Getting the help of a career coach to sort out my career

elsietanner71

Oldernotwiser wrote: »

Careers Service Direct only seems to offer Information and Advice.

I'm surprised you say that you have experienced it since in post 10 you didn't even know the Careers Advice Service offered guidance by telephone.

Street_hawk_2

Hi, again.

Zazen 999:
‘Yes, that's how it works. I can type pretty much what I want as long as it doesn't break the rules. I am allowed to have worked in the Training Industry for 10 years and to form an opinion - and to share it on the internet. ‘

Yes, everyone is allowed to express their opinion based upon their experiences but it is not fair to mislead someone on an issue if the situation you are describing is no longer accurate or your opinion is based upon incorrect facts.

For example, someone might post a question on a forum: ‘I need to develop my skills at work - shall I speak to HR about it?
And I might say in response: ‘My experience of various HR Training and Development managers over the last decade that I have worked is that they do very little to improve staff skills and will rarely give you worthwhile training for both current and future roles. So I wouldn’t bother.’ This opinion is based upon my own personal experiences of HR, and so I am simply describing my experience.
However, the requests by me for such training could have been made many years ago and things might have changed a lot since then with HR taking staff training more seriously. Perhaps I wasn’t asking the right questions or persistent enough, or the companies I worked for just did not have the money to invest in staff. I wouldn’t want someone to miss out on a genuine opportunity based upon one person’s bad or outdated experience, and I certainly wouldn’t want to misinform someone.

‘Bearing in mind, I am unlikely to actually meet the OP and discuss their future prospects; it is impossible to 'step up', isn't it? ‘

-Fair enough. I realised after posting this comment that such a challenge couldn’t be done. Notice the difference: I am prepared to acknowledge my mistakes, genuine or otherwise, I could say something disingenuous like ‘well it’s an internet forum and I’m allowed to express my opinion that we can ‘step up’ whether it is actually possible or not doesn’t matter – even under a Tory govt’’…but I won’t.


’And for me, my experience of listening to the 'advice' given on these telephone guidance services was not good. It was limited to the areas that the person could type into google and was scripted answers rather than shaped around the person. And that's from watching from the inside not the outside...’

This brings us back to the central problem here. Your experience while clearly valid is now outdated and inaccurate since the service you are referring to has for the last 6 years employed fully qualified guidance practitioners. The script and googling you're referring to is used by the advisors who deal with the Information and Advice side of the service rather than the guidance part. It seems clear that you either visited or experienced the service before the guidance was introduced, or if it was in more recent times then you were sat next to an advisor who dealt with Information and Advice rather than Guidance.

Oldnotwiser:
I still think that being able to see someone's facial expression and body language are important aspects of the process and that something will be missing with a telephone service.

The idea that you cannot give a full guidance session with someone because you are not sat in front of them is not accurate. I remember my face to face career experience at University when I wanted to be a journalist and the face to face advisor asked me how will I do that? I said I need to do a postgrad journalism course. He gave me a few books with information about courses and journalism and we met 2 weeks later. He said was that okay for you? I said yes and that was the end of that. Despite being face to face he didn’t pick up on any of my body language which clearly showed how unsure I was about whether this was the right decision. Needless to say, I didn’t bother with the course and proceeded to tell everyone that careers advisors are a waste of time!
Over the phone, I would ask that person is there anything making you unsure about this and probe further.
A good careers coach can work face to face and interpret body language etc and a good careers coach can work over the phone and pick up on tone, breathing, certain keywords, pauses etc and can also simply ask good questions: ‘How sure are you about this? What’s stopping you from doing this? Have you tried making a change with your career before? Etc’
A bad careers coach can mess up both. People who use the telephone guidance service routinely testify to how good it is and make genuine progress.

‘Having been out of the profession for a couple of years now, I've checked my information. The two most local universities to me are Porstmouth and Southampton; Portsmouth offers its graduates a service for up to 5 years after graduation and Southampton offers it for up to 3. Always a good idea to check before correcting someone.’

Check your facts? Why? It doesn't matter - I'm allowed to express my opinion remember regardless of whether my facts are accurate. From my many years of experience of uni guidance in different ways I have come to that opinion and so therefore am entitled according to yourself to express it regardless of whether you like it or not or whether it is factually correct because this is an internet forum and that is how it works.

(I did say ‘ongoing’ and so it’s fair to say 3 to 5 yrs is ongoing. However, like earlier I’m prepared to amend the point – universities offer differing lengths of ongoing careers support after you graduate, I’m not sure what the average is.)

‘the ICG and everyone in the area of adult IAG would have loved for there to be an all age guidance service as in Wales and Scotland but this was never going to happen after the introduction of the Connexions Service and it would no doubt, have been cut by this new government even if it had been introduced’

It seems to me that your real concern here is that you feel that the many years of hard work and important achievements of face to face guidance is being devalued by a cheaper service over the phone, and since cost-cutting is always paramount for any government the future may very well be more telephone guidance and less face to face.

I don’t agree with that vision of the future – I think there’s plenty of room for both. I respect the hard work of my fellow colleagues in guidance and just ask that they respect the hard work I put in to my job instead of suggesting it is not as good considering it is the quality of the advisor rather than the method used to deliver it that counts.

I’ll finish by saying that at no point have I said that either private careers coaching, face to face, or telephone is better than the other. I know people who have gained from both and other people who haven't had any joy from it. Google people's experiences of private careers coaching services and there's plenty of people who say they just charge a lot of money and make you do a load of psychometric testing (which can normally be done for free on the internet) and then try and match them to roles that will be suitable, re-work their CV, tell them what kinds of training/courses they will need to do (again these things can be found out by looking at the many job profiles on various free websites) and then use a few visualisation techniques and setting some long term goals. There’s plenty of people not happy with where their money goes.

The original question was about whether it’s worth using a careers coach because of the cost and my answer is do the following:

Ring NextStep for a face to face session - free
Ring The Careers Advice Service for a telephone guidance session - free
Then use a private careers coaching service if you still need to.

And let us know how it goes. Good luck.

I’m done with my comments now. Have a good ‘un.

Zazen999

Perhaps you should stick to telephone advice; at least people can put the phone down whilst you do it.

Did either of us want an essay? I know I didn't.

Oldernotwiser

elsietanner71 wrote: »

I'm surprised you say that you have experienced it since in post 10 you didn't even know the Careers Advice Service offered guidance by telephone.

I didn't phone with a guidance type enquiry, I asked only for information and advice. If you look at the website, which is all most people see, you have to dig very deep to see the word guidance mentioned at all.

Oldernotwiser

Street_hawk wrote: »

The original question was about whether it’s worth using a careers coach because of the cost and my answer is do the following:

Ring NextStep for a face to face session - free
Ring The Careers Advice Service for a telephone guidance session - free
Then use a private careers coaching service if you still need to.

And let us know how it goes. Good luck.

I’m done with my comments now. Have a good ‘un.

We are totally in agreement on this.

Oldernotwiser

Reported as Spam.