Ways of Choosing a Career Path: Are There Really More Than 12? Clickbait or Not? Part 3.
If we compile the various sources of advice, influences, processes, and formats clearly defined (source: CNESCO - French gov agency), without considering the purpose, quality of the process, or outcome, here’s a list we get:
- Teachers’ advice
- Influence from parents, cousins, etc.
- Career fairs
- Following a friend’s choice
- The student’s main passion
- Choosing a prestigious school for its reputation
- A path that keeps the most doors open
- A career with the highest earning potential
- Free or paid career aptitude tests
- Career assessments
- Career counselors
- Career coaching
- And every other service or package marketed under different labels, generally aiming to provide "career guidance" (without any precise definition of the term), often based on invented methods or rehashed combinations of tests and assessments
How many counted 13? Some of you are slacking off—I’m keeping notes! Yes, there are indeed more than 12, because as someone who regularly monitors career guidance offerings for AFCSE, I can tell you that if we add in various programs and books found on Amazon, there are easily twenty or thirty variations circulating.
Don’t worry; we won’t review them all. We'll focus on the main types available as support options for when you feel lost and need a clearer sense of what each offers.
There’s no need to dig deeply into advice sources here since we have no real context or methodology to assess them. Public options like career counseling offices (CIOs) and school-based career counselors are complex and opaque, so we’ll focus quickly on the private sector, where we have concrete analysis to work with.
From this list, we focus on aptitude tests, assessments, career counseling, career coaching, and other packages. Career assessments and counseling are basically the same thing: they start with a series of tests whose origins and validity remain largely unknown. However, the foundational models are almost always the same: workplace personality tests like RIASEC or MBTI.
Other "invented" methods are too minor to dwell on, and fortunately, I don’t know them all. The goal here is to identify what might actually be useful for parents as they navigate these tools, processes, or methods to help guide their children thoughtfully!
