Temjenkaba
Guidance Programme for career development typically has employed opportunities as one of their main focus. This tends to make clients, particularly students, believe that they must look for job openings, and tends to foster dependence rather that initiative and self-reliance. When job opening becomes scarce, they feel deprived and helpless or sometimes rebellious excepting that the state must provide them with employment or with unemployment benefits. In these days when employment is rampant, guidance programme should be disseminate information regarding prevailing unemployment and that, which is foreseen in the next few years, and draw attention to opportunities for self-employment. The programme should include information regarding facilities for training or re-training, consultative service, financial aid such as loan and tax concession, labor laws etc as well as a component designed to facilitate attitudinal change.
We should turn our attention to guidance services and programme for career development in certain broad setting, reviewing their problems shortcomings and suggesting way of strengthening the services career development includes not only development of concepts, regarding work and knowledge about occupation but also the development of the self-concept in relation to the world of works. The development of self-concept involves differentiating the self from other and understanding and accepting the self, including one’s abilities, interest, values, the meaning and importance of work in one’s own life. The preferred life style is a process of finding one’s vocational identity of implementing and one’s self-concept in vocational terms.
Exploratory experience involving exposure to activities and there setting in the world of work, facilitate this process, the learning experience must be provided by the school through a variety of career project supported by audio visual aids, observation and interaction with different types of workers, and the try-out of various work activities wherever feasible. There is also good scope for integrating career development programme with the programmes of work experience, which many schools are now offering.
Self-Exploration in terms of one’s psychological abilities, interest, values etc is also needed during adolescent years. The school guidance service must provide opportunities for this through various means such as the use of psychological test and non testing techniques, a joint review of the student’s development as recorded in the cumulative record card or folder, participation in co-curricular activities, hobbies, part-time or vacation work experience and voluntary community service.
The school should also provide adequate opportunities for counseling in order to help the student to evaluate all these experiences, to integrate them to a vocational self-concept and to make educational decisions and plans in constancy with his self-concept and the realities of the world of work. In the process the student should be helped to learn decision-making skills, which will be useful to him all through his life. In cultures where parents play a predominate role in career decision-making, the councilor will have to involve the parents too in some phases of the counseling.
(A DIPR Feature)
