Ever tried professional (paid) career advice?

Vietnam

Curious to learn if anyone out there has tried professional career advice which they have paid money for as opposed to free, and what their experience/impressions were?
What are your opinions and would you recommend it?

marcus1234

I have paid for courses for online training/advice. What helped me be prepared at interview (and application to get there) was "civil service success co uk" course if you google it for creating solid behavioural examples in my civil service application and interview, I got the civil service job i wanted afterwards so very positive for me. I also considered face to face interview training at "interview skills clinic" who specialise in civil service interviews also - however they were out of my price range.

kimwp

I did a course (paid for by my employer) called "Managing Your Career". It was run by a psychologist and was excellent, it covered all sorts of useful things, but the most valuable in terms of job picking was the idea of taking time to really think about what type of job you enjoy; another way to think about it is what you want the job to involve. Thinking about level of autonomy, amount of interaction with others, tasks involved, subject matter etc is really useful - I then approached contacts asking if they knew of roles which fulfilled what I wanted. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out and i used the same list when deciding (against) a career change recently.