Chapter 11 Blog

            Chapter 11 of Brown’s book was very informative.  I never realized there were so many tools out there to help people find fitting careers.  He did a great job of laying out a lot of information in a concise way to help someone navigate the options (Brown, 2016).

            I think my favorite part of the chapter was the beginning when he outlines the different ways that career information can help various groups of people.  The obvious is always the adolescents.  They need to decide on a career path at a relatively young age.  Adolescents are supposed to know what they want to do when they apply to college.  From there they are to take courses and begin applying to positions upon graduation.  I know that in my own high school and undergrad experiences, we were not offered career counseling.  Our school counselors were not even a big part of our high school lives.  Once I was in college we were told to get an internship for one of my classes, however, if I took a different class, I wouldn’t have had any sort of work experience before graduation.  It was not mandatory.  This means that many students graduate from college without any formal type of internship.  They have decided what they wanted to do at 17 years of age, declared a major in college, taken the appropriate classes, and were sent off into the world to hope they enjoy what they chose.  So, it makes sense that adolescents would be in need of career counseling the most.  However, I never thought of how adults (who are in a position that they enjoy) and retirees could benefit from career counseling.  On page 222, Brown explains this.  He says that adults can benefit from career counseling by learning about training opportunities to grow in their current positions, how they can figure out if they are being paid appropriately, how to get employability skills, and so on.  Retirees and career counseling would not have made sense without reading this either.  Brown says that career counseling can help them to find enjoyable part-time employment and teach them how to use the skills they learned during their employment (Brown, 2016).

            After this he goes on to explain the different tools that individuals can use to assist in career counseling.  Many of these are pretty common knowledge, such as job fairs and internships, but others are new to me- and I also think would be very helpful if more people knew about them.  For example, ONET is such a great tool and so easy to use.  Brown has a student learning exercise on page 226 that would be very helpful for a student that wanted to gain some new information on a few different career path options.  Beyond the computer-assisted career guidance systems, the simulations, games and career conferences could be a huge asset to students outside of the traditional job fairs and internships (Brown, 2016).

Brown, D.  (2016).  Career information, career counseling, and career development (11^th ed.). 

Boston, MA: Pearson.