By: Temjenkaba : Guidance programme for career development typically have employed opportunities as one of the main foci, this tends to make clients, particularly students, believe that they must look for job openings and tends to foster dependence rather that initiative and self reliance.
When job opening become scarce, they feel deprived and helpless or sometimes rebellious expecting that the state must provide them with employment or with unemployment benefits. In these days when employment is rampant, guidance programme should disseminate information regarding prevailing unemployment and that which is foreseen in the next few years and draw attention to opportunities for self employment. The programme should include information regarding facilities for training or re-training, consultative services, financial aid such as loans and tax concession labor laws etc as well as a component designed to facilitate attitudinal change.
We should turn our attention to guidance services and programme for career development in certain broad setting reviewing problems and shortcoming and suggest way of strengthening the service. Career development includes not only development of concepts regarding work and knowledge about occupation but also the development of the self concept in relation to the world of work. The development of the self concept is a process which involves differentiating the self from others and understanding and accepting the self including one’s abilities, interest, values, the meaning and importance of work in one’s own life. The preferred life style etc is a process of finding one’s vocational identity of implementing one’s self concept in vocational terms.
Exploratory experience involving exposure to activities and their setting in the world of work facilitate this process. The learning experience must be provided by the school through a variety of career projects support by audio visual aids, observation of and interaction with different types of workers and the try-out of various work activities wherever feasible. There is also good scope for integrating career development with the programme of work experience which many schools are now offering.
Self exploration in terms of one’s psychological abilities, interest, values etc is also needed during adolescent years. The school guidance service must provide opportunities for this, through various means such as the use of psychological test and non testing techniques, a joint review of the student’s development as recorded in the cumulative record card or folder, participation in co-curricular activities, hobbies, part time or vacation, work experience and voluntary community service.
The school should also provide adequate opportunities for counseling, in order to help the student to evaluate all these experience to integrate them to a vocational self concept and to make educational decisions and plans in consonance with his self concept and the realities of the world of work. In the process the student should be helped to learn decision making skills which will be useful to him all through his life. In cultures where parents play a predominant role in career decision making the counselor will have to involve the parents too in some phase of the counseling.