I recently wrote in Dr G’s Eyes Wide Open that Career Advice is often approached by parents and their kids as the “Elephant in the Room”. Parents see the topic as large and complicated because they generally had negative experiences in their youth and their kids see the issue as one best to avoid because they really don’t have any user friendly tools to help them to make progress. Getting to grips with the world of careers is best avoided or at least delayed until we no longer can delay for any longer!

One of the big issues is how best to balance who does what. By that, I mean who takes responsibility for progress in deciding on career choices and at what point “expert” advice is sought. It seems to me that there’s an ideal balance between an individual student and their career responsibilities and getting external help involved. For many students, outside help happens well before they’ve really tried to even think about the issues for themselves. To me, this seems the wrong way around. It’s a bit like a consultant arriving at the doors of corporation X with a ready solution to their strategic problem but the board haven’t agreed that there is a strategy problem.

Students need to be receptive to external help – in whatever form that arrives. Receptivity is best raised, in my view, by the student initially trying to make progress on their own, with any tools they can pick up on the web. One of the problems at that age, is that you don’t know what you don’t know. So, students need to find tools that will help them to realise what they don’t know and improve their self – insight. It’s only once an individual has grappled with the issues on their own, made some progress and perhaps struggled in a particular area that this person is ready to engage with outside help. I’m not only referring to the fact that the student now has a better feel for the questions they want to ask and have answered, I’m also referring to the fact that, having found the process challenging means that the student is far more likely to be receptive to advice and input from someone else.

Once the student has engaged with an expert and had some of the difficult questions answered and pointers given to others, they are then “liberated” to make further progress on their own. At this point, assuming that the student is starting to focus on several career options, research skills become important.