Career counseling/consulting/coaching: is it worth it?

[Lights]

I'm considering a change of careers. However, I'm in a strange situation: I no longer know what I'd actually like.

 

What is a good next step to find such things out? I'm considering going to a career consulting/counseling/whatever in an attempt to find out more of what's out there, and to get a job search into high gear with them when I find out.

 

I've been to career counseling in my college days; they were a sick joke, although in those days I was more interested in doing the resume-polishing and other aspects of their services (which turned out to be a sickeningly horrific failure). As a result, I know I cannot trust just anyone, but I have no way of knowing who's real and who's just another chump who posted up a website and concocted testimonials. I don't have the advantage of friends who've done such things successfully before, so word-of-mouth isn't available to me.

 

What would be a good step to take to make sure I'm dealing with the wizards and not the chumps as career counseling/coaching/etc. goes?

[Lights]

Does anyone here have any experiences to share?

[Guest]

There are very good career counselors and counseling services. There are also a lot of great books and great online resources.

 

The University of Waterloo in Canada has a very good careers website. There's an online book called Wishcraft that a lot of people really like.

 

What you need to do is sort out what you are good at and enjoy doing and then how to do that for a living. Sometimes you can't do the exact thing you enjoy (a woman once joked 'who will pay me to masturbate and go out to dinner' haha) but you can very often find jobs or careers that come close (no pun intended).

 

To do that, you need to examine yourself and your life in terms of what your values are, how you work best (at home or in a workplace, alone or with a team, etc), and what kind of lifestyle you want, among other things.

 

The old theories of career counseling were about matching people's interests to jobs but there's much more than that - maybe you're perfectly suited to be an astronaut but you don't want to spend 15 years in intensive training to get the rewards. Nowadays, more is taken into account than just your interests.

 

But like with anything, you can get good or bad career counselors. I'd suggest calling a local university career service and asking them who they recommend if you want to do more than explore on your own.

[Lights]

Thank you very much, Guest, for your well-thought-out reply.