With subject choice counselling as a forerunner to career guidance counselling, Career and subject choice guidance counselling can be defined broadly as the process in which a professional guidance counsellor helps an individual or a group of individuals to make satisfying career- and school subject-related decisions. This process acknowledges the intersection between career counselling and personal counselling by attending to and addressing the personal issues clients bring with them to their career counselling. Career and subject choice guidance counselling and assessment is useful in assisting clients to design their lives in the new postmodern world of work.
The process of career and subject choice guidance counselling usually involves a process whereby the therapist and client collaboratively seek to determine the following:
• what the client wishes to achieve through the career and subject choice counselling
• why the client cannot (or chooses not to) make the career or subject choice decision on his/her own
• what the client’s relative academic and work-related strengths and weaknesses are
• what the client’s academic and work-related preferences are
Career and subject choice guidance counselling usually make use of psychological assessment. Therefore, in order to provide for the needs of his clients, Hannes relies on a comprehensive and collaborative approach to career and subject choice assessment by relying on the combination of standardised psychological tests and qualitative assessment techniques. Hannes views career and subject choice counselling not as a static event, but rather as a developmental process which started in childhood and continues through adulthood. There are at least three general reasons why assessment in career and subject choice counselling is important:
1. To stimulate, broaden, and provide focus to career and subject choice exploration
2. to stimulate exploration of self in relation to career and academic subject choices
3. to provide information with respect to various career and subject choice options
Hannes generally implements the following four distinct phases in the career and subject choice guidance counselling process:
1. First phase: Reviewing of client’s records and background information. The information obtained from this review including that gathered from the preliminary interview with the client, is used to formulate a plan for assessment.
2. Second phase: Formal assessment of important psychological constructs take places, such as the assessment of the client’s work values, the relative importance of different life roles, career maturity, abilities, personality, and interests.
3. Third phase: The client and therapist work together by integrating all the available information that are relevant to understand the client’s position in terms of the career and subject choice decision-making process.
4. Fourth phase: The final phase involves counselling with the aim of addressing the career- or subject choice-related needs identified during the assessment process.
Hannes acknowledges that one’s personal life is closely linked to one’s career development. When asked what defined a psychologically healthy person, Sigmund Freud’s answer was “To love and work”. According to Freud, if a person was able to hold down a job and maintain healthy relationships with people then they are, generally speaking, psychologically healthy.