…And Five Even Better Reasons To Do So…
1. You think a Seattle career counselor can introduce you to hiring managers at Microsoft, Amazon.com, and Starbucks.
TRUTH: Career counselors are not recruiters paid by organizations to find and place talent. Career counselors are professionally trained to help you to clarify your interests, personality, strengths, and values so that you will know what you want, and then the counselor will teach you how to market yourself effectively to reach your clearly defined goals.
2. You don’t like sales so you want to hire a career counselor to market you and to convince the hiring manager to make you an offer.
TRUTH: Celebrities, professional athletes, and some best-selling authors have agents. The rest of us don’t, so we have to do our own self-promotion. For the 99% of the population who aren’t already successful and famous, the person who can be the most convincing about your talent is you.
3. You want to take the test that will tell you which type of work will make you happy.
TRUTH: Only assessment publishers and salespersons who market career assessments would claim that a test can tell you what to do. All career assessments have some measurement error and the assessments are only as good as the info you give them. They can be helpful because they accelerate the process of gaining self-awareness and I’m a fan of assessments, but no ethical career counselor would make inflated claims about the helpfulness of assessments.
4. You need to do some research before you can make a career decision, but it seems easier to hire a career counselor to do it for you.
TRUTH: The best part of research is when you stumble across something you’ve never even heard of and it turns out to be an extremely good career path for you. It works better when you do the heavy lifting of research by yourself. If you really hate the idea of doing research and you want to hire someone to do it for you, consider hiring a student or graduate of the University of Washington Information School.
5. You are worried about the economy and you want a Seattle career counselor to tell you which jobs will be recession-proof in the Puget Sound economy.
TRUTH: Economists and other people with Ph.D.s in Labor Economics can’t seem to get these predictions 100% right, so career counselors certainly can’t! Career counselors do use labor market data from expert sources such as the United States Department of Labor, but this information is only part of the picture. Read the data, yes, and let it be one factor in your occupational decision-making, but please don’t get too comfortable with the idea of a “recession-proof” vocational path. No work is completely recession-proof, but vocational experts can help you to design strategies to minimize the effects of economic ups and downs on your livelihood.
Now that you’ve read the blog post above, do you want to hire a Seattle career counselor for the right reasons? If so, here is a list of Seattle career counselors and Seattle career coaches.