How Guidance & Counselling Helps Students in Career Choices

Nzotta Joseph

Proper guidance is very important in helping a young person’s career choice and advancement in order to achieve personal goals and societal expectations. Because of this, there is need for professional guidance and counselling in the development of the child. This assists in building the young person’s careers pathway early enough. Basically, guidance and counselling assists to build an individual to attain personal growth and contribute meaningfully to national development.

Guidance is a conscious attempt to correct and support an individual through activities that help them foster wise decisions. From another perspective guidance has to do with activities that assist a person to decide what he or she wants to do and how best to do it in order to yield positive results. The critical issues in guidance are:

To help an individual in learning
To help an individual understand their environment
To position them to adopt the right behaviors
To assist them in understanding themselves.

Children grow up to become useful individuals in any society. This depends on how well they are taught and raised. For instance, we have seen students who scored excellent school certificate results but when they get to higher institutions, they lack focus and become morally bankrupt and indiscipline. This is due to the lack of good training and guidance. Instances abound where brilliant students start having very low grades because nobody noticed they were facing peer pressure in their school or misplacement of priorities. However, when a child receives proper guidance, they grow with direction and become more focused. They discover who they are, their likeness and preferences and thus make better choices including career decisions, which assists them to contribute meaningfully to the development of the society at large.

Counselling on the other hand is employed to correct and support an individual to solve personal problems or meet their expectations. A good example is counseling of a student on drug abuse or deviant behaviors. This shows that guidance and counselling is important in career choices and personal development.

There are four reasons for guidance and counselling

It assists the student in fostering organizational commitment and loyalty: Through mentorship and guidance programs offered at schools, children will always feel a sense of support and value. When children feel emotionally and socially connected, they will develop loyalty, stay engaged and are less likely to drop out of school.
Guidance and Counselling addresses the emotional needs of a child: This is achieved by giving them a safe and confidential environment where they can discuss their personal concerns and emotional distress.
Guidance and Counselling helps children to deal with social and cultural challenges: It enables children to face social and cultural clashes by building self-awareness. Also, it helps them to learn useful skills that aid in conflict resolution.
It guides the young persons on career choices: Guidance and counselling assists to discover job opportunities that will match their skills. It does this by exposing them to jobs that will fit their personality traits. This stops them from guessing their paths.

It is important to note that Guidance and counselling is not control. It’s not shouting. Guidance and counselling are being present for your children. It’s answering questions patiently, it is supportive in nature and ensures that corrections are made with love and concern. Parents, teachers, mentors, older siblings are all guides. The children we guide today will one day guide a company, a family or a nation. Thus, the question right now is not “Do children need guidance?” The real question is “who is guiding the child in your care now?”

This is important because in the near future, they will be the ones making decisions that affect us all.

Nzotta Joseph wrote from Owerri, Imo State

How Guidance & Counselling Helps Students in Career Choices