Empowering career search and enrichment

Provide concrete, real-life examples, rather than metaphors or stories, to illustrate the points you are reviewing with your student.

Speak in a linear manner.  This type of student wants the career process described in a sequential, linear way.  Start with step 1, then go to step 2, and move to Step 3, and so forth.  These students will get lost if you jump around to wherever the conversation leads or what inspires the counselor.  This is the student that the 4-year career plan was made for! 

Provide practical applications.  When explaining informational interviewing, for instance, clearly illustrate how this job search technique is a practical and linear process for narrowing a student’s major/career options.  

In my next post, I will give you four more suggestion before I move onto counseling strategies for students with a preference for Intuition. 

Working so closely with the Education Market, I was naturally curious to generate the different reports that are available for students in helping them with the career exploration process. One of the most recent ones generated for me was the MBTI® Career Report Form M. Even though I am no longer a student, I still found the results to be very interesting, as this report is also a great resource for anyone looking for a career change or for increasing job satisfaction.

The MBTI Career Report matches your preferred personality type with a list of occupational titles that compare with those of your same type who are satisfied in those fields. Here is a walk through of the report sections with what I found to be the most useful aspects to share with you during a counseling session with your students:

Summary of Your Myers-Briggs® (MBTI®) Assessment Results
As with all reports, this page gives you a brief summary of your type. The table on this page is a great resource to use with a student as a way to verify their preferred type after they have been given their initial interpretation of the MBTI instrument.

How Your Type Affects Your Career Choice
I was given a summary of both Preferred Work Tasks and Preferred Work Environment according to my type. The majority of my own work tasks included helping others, such as “focusing on people and process issues rather than on technical problems”. This section gets your student thinking about a certain occupation they may be considering and how their type may play out in that particular environment. A great online resource to find information on occupations is by visiting the O*NET database (http://online.onetcenter.org/). This is especially helpful as most students do not know what to expect as far as environment or work tasks in their desired occupation.

How Your Type Affects Your Career Exploration
This section identifies what your strengths are in the career exploration process. You are also given a list of challenges along with suggested strategies. This is a great section to help your students familiarize themselves with their preferred type and have them focus on their strengths. For example, one of my challenges is that I may make decisions on what I think will please others. My dominant Feeling preference sometimes gets in the way as I tend to worry about others around me instead of thinking about how it will affect my goals and their outcome. Therefore, that is what I need to get myself to focus on next time I have a decision to make.

How Your Type Affects Your Career Development
I found this section to be most useful for someone who has been out in the ‘real world’ at their job. As you know, certain aspects of our workplaces are not always ideal for our natural preferences. For example, having a preference for Introversion in a company which expects you to brainstorm ideas out loud during meetings can be hard to get used to. We have to learn to adapt by sometimes using our nonpreferred preferences in order to survive, or at least feel comfortable in our jobs. This section gives you a list of how your style has helped you to develop strengths in different areas. Just as the section above, you are also presented with challenges and suggested strategies for overcoming those.

Job Families and Occupations for [Your Type]
This section gets into the fun part! This section is divided into three parts. The first lists what’s called a Ranking of Job Families for [Your Type]. Here you are presented with a bar graph that includes 22 broad occupational categories (“job families”), each with specific occupations, and how they rank in popularity with those who share your type. This graph is broken down into Most Attractive, Moderately Attractive and Least Attractive.

The second part lists the Most Popular Occupations for [Your Type]. It is important to note that a student should not take the listed occupations too literally, especially since they do not have much experience with the world of work. The tasks and the environment of the occupation are what need to be stressed for the student to gain a better understanding of which job titles may be of most interest to them.

The last part lists the Least Popular Occupations for [Your Type]. Again, it needs to be stressed to a student that the listed occupations should not to be taken too literally. It is important to remember that people with your student’s type do enter these occupations, but not in large numbers as to be classified under a popular occupation for that type. This is where a follow up session may come in to place to discuss what type of environment your student should expect in this occupation and how to manage any situations that may arise.

If you are interested in learning more about this report or sharing it with your students, check it out here. I hope you found this walk through helpful and look for more blogs like this to help you during your counseling sessions!