Adult career counseling is for those who hate their job, lost their job, or just want a much better job. In these difficult economic times, adult career counseling can be a foundation of your career coaching business.

For this article, adult career counseling will refer to counseling for those who have already been in the job market for a time, not for recent high school or college graduates. With the employment and hiring chaos that exists in today’s world, there is a huge target market for this type of coaching.

Adult Career Counseling for the Bored, the Unemployed and the Truly Inspired

There are plenty of paying saying:

• “I hate my job.”
• “My job doesn’t interest me.”
• “I want a new career.”
• “I want to go back to school and train for a new career.”
• “My job bores me.”
• “My company downsized and I lost my job.”
• I want to fire my boss and start my own business.”

These people are your potential clients. These people are your personal goldmine. These people are your career!

6 Steps to Effective Adult Career Counseling

1. Get to know your clients. Determine their personality, interests, hobbies, dislikes, skills, values, and aspirations. Career-based assessments are frequently give during this phase of coaching.
2. Allow your clients to get to know themselves. This is done by using the information you gained through career-based assessments and fashioning inquiry-based sessions around this knowledge.
3. Generate career options based on assessments and inquiry. It is always best if the options are generated by the client instead of coming from the coach. This can include specific job categories and specific jobs.
4. Help the client identify ways to gather information about various jobs, job categories, and careers. Whether through classified ads, online posting, business networks, education material, or other resources, a good comprehensive, wide-ranging amount of information is needed to make an informed decision about what career path the client should take.
5. Identify and discuss barriers and obstacles. Why is the client not happy or fulfilled? Why have they not achieved their goals? If they are afraid to make a change, why? The identification of these obstacles is an important step that allows the client to view these obstacles more as curves in the road instead of dead ends.
6. The final step in the adult career counseling process is to help clients create road maps to their goals and dreams. A detailed pathway to the job or career of their choice will contain everything needed to reach the finish line – adult educational requirements, additional training, job search criteria, lifestyle changes, behavior modification, networking needs, and more.

These six steps are crucial to your client’s success in reaching their goals and dreams, and essential to your success as an adult career counselor and coach. With a tight job market, a roller-coaster economy, and increased competition for personally and financially rewarding jobs, career coaching is a hot business with a growing target market and more opportunities to make a difference in your own life as well as the lives of countless others.

Hope you took some great value out of this post today! I’d love to hear your feedback, so make sure you leave a comment with your thoughts or questions. And also, you can click on the Twitter button below to retweet this article…Thank you!

Fred Philips
Business Coach
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