Counselling at the crossroads — Parvez Jamil

Given the fact counselling is mostly pursued by trends or fashion, the net result is choked creativity, escapist tendencies or violent outbursts 

As a business promotion strategy, a posh institution once experimented to modernise, revolutionise and revitalise education by following the western system of counselling blindly and making a mess of it altogether. The proprietor merely wanted to introduce counselling in order to give his institution a trendy, fashionable or modern disposition but his miserly, tight-fisted and penny-pinching psychology would not allow him to hire a full-time specialist to counsel the young ones. He assigned the additional role of counselling to someone who was already working as the course coordinator, besides being an excellent physics teacher. With teaching physics to five classes, overall course coordination and counselling an hour every day after school with no additional pay and mounting accountability by the management, the poor teacher was left in the lurch and left! He could deliver neither the quality nor produce any good results despite the excellence he possessed.

Lodhran Pilot Project - Career Counseling

Career Counseling

Our career development is a lifelong process that, whether we know it or not, actually started when we were born! There are a number of factors that influence our career development, including our interests, abilities, values, personality, background, and circumstances. It helps us to know and understand our self and the world of work in order to make career, educational, and life decisions. It really is a lifelong process, meaning that throughout our life we will change, situations will change, and we will continually have to make career and life decisions.
Peter Drucker said:

"The best way to predict our future is to create it."

It gives us sense to think about our future. Career Counseling plays an important role in our life. In developing countries like Pakistan there is no concept about career counseling. It is very important for students, teachers, businessman etc. like as we are students of intermediate and we have completed our ten years of schooling. During these ten years nobody told us about career counseling but we needed it. Like after matric we did not know what to do now? Every way was in front of us but we did not know which one to be chosen. Some people said you should join the field of medical, some said join engineering it has many benefits and some said about commerce. We got confused and did that what our parents said. Before some days some career counselors came and told us about career counseling. We had a workshop with them about career counseling. They made our concepts clear about it. We are thankful to Allah Almighty for showering his special blessings on us through that workshop. That workshop was organized by L.P.P (Lodhran Pilot Project). After getting knowledge about career counseling through that workshop we got the answers of all these following questions which we had in our mind.
• How do we decide what type of career goals are right for us?
• What type of work environment fits us best?
• What field of study should we pursue?
• What if our career goals are different from what our families think they should be?
• What if we make a choice and then change our minds?
• What should we do if our career goals are failed?
Now we can see our future very bright because we know what we have to do in our future life and we have also developed our thoughts through that workshop.
The goal of Career Counseling is to give us the opportunity to begin exploring the elements of a career that make sense or seem to fit for us. The results can offer us insight into the type of tasks we may enjoy, the kind of things that are important to us, and the types of skills for which we have an aptitude or talent. In addition, results will suggest some career goals and occupations that we may want to research further.
We owe our special thanks to career counselors who gave us sense about best future. We are highly indebted to L.P.P (Lodhran Pilot Project) for organizing such kinds of workshops for Lodhran’s people. We also owe our deepest sense of gratitude to Mr. Jahangir Khan Tareen for organizing these kinds of workshops for the betterment of students which inculcating in us a self believe which proved out to be our greatest source of strength.

Written by
Muhammad Owais Sajjad, Waseem Abbas, Alauddin Awan
Superior College Lodhran.