Would I Make a Good Career Counselor?
A career counselor helps all sorts of people figure out which career suits them best. On average, they earn anywhere from $56,000 to $86,000 annually. Most career counselors work for schools, but there are other options as well.
Career counselors should have three major abilities to find success in their work: group influencing, brainstorming, and assisting. They work well in groups and generate ideas. They can influence other people’s progress and see challenges from more than one point of view. They also develop plans to influence advertising campaigns and may enjoy politics.
These are simply the minimum abilities to perform this kind of work. Each ability combination plays a role in how they express themselves as a career counselor.
If you’re wondering whether you possess these traits, find out here.
One career counselor I worked with scored highest in the skill of selling and persuading. That means she scored highest in Extroversion, Idea Productivity and Tonal Memory. She was good at getting clients but wasn’t as skilled at understanding and deciphering complicated ability patterns. She simply presented the information she saw without being able to see the unique pattern of real people. Few people’s ability pattern fit exactly any one of the 64 Highlands Career Patterns, and exact profile fits are rare. She was not able to customize the information for an individual’s specific career needs, and the individual would have to do that themselves.
Another career counselor I know has all the talent-based reasoning abilities. This counselor finds it relatively easy and enjoyable to customize and tailor testing information from multiple sources to individual needs. That means clients with unique ability patterns will find that this counselor is able to highlight the best career niche that fully appeals to them. Because her reasoning abilities are non-training based, she is capable of naturally reasoning through information without a book or formula. She can decipher each new pattern for specific careers. But, she was more reticent to and less skilled at selling her services.
