Vocational & Career
We once had a young man come to counseling to work on his depression. He was happy at home, having been married several years to an affectionate and supportive spouse, yet he was very unhappy with his job. It was interesting that he found a job at a company right after college graduation, and that employer was a big player in the area of his degree – civil engineering. Yet he hated it. He even reported that he hated all of the jobs at the company, so it was not as though he simply had the wrong role within the organization. He was in the wrong industry.
After some assessments were administered and interpreted, we began to discuss how he had always wanted to be a police officer. Since he was a little boy, this was what he had imagined he would do one day. Yet he studied Civil Engineering because he had been led to believe this could lead to a long-term growth path to prosperity and satisfaction. When we talked about and began to remove the obstacles to his transition to policing, he talked with his wife about our discussions. She told him if he wanted to go to the police academy, she was going to support him 100%. We ended our counseling a short time later with the client reporting he needed some time to think about it. We received an e-mail from him several years later in which he proudly informed us that he had just been hired as a New Jersey State Trooper.
We are working on building relationships with Bergen County high schools to offer the Guidance staff support in their efforts to provide the optimal vocational and career counseling experience. Before colleges are selected and even before college curricula are considered, students should have a thorough exploration of their skills, their interests, and their long-term goals. We can administer assessments that will provide objective information to students and their parents for decision-making. We can identify sources of information online and search techniques for students to learn more about the world of work and how they might fit into it. No one needs to take an extra year of college to finish because they changed their mind and changed their major. No one needs to spend that extra money or lose money because they have to delay the start of their career by a year. No one needs to get five or ten years into an occupation before they realize they should have been more careful about their career choice. We can help. Consider this: Career Counseling.
