Academic Student Career Coaching
Here's a detailed presentation of the career coaching services I offer.
It's a combination of genuine reflection guided by our discussions, in which you'll have to invest yourself, and research or exercises, to which you'll have to devote a little time between sessions.
This is not a service where I tell you what job you're cut out for or what you're made for by means of a test or questionnaire, and suggest the corresponding training courses, all based on your grades. This type of service is not coaching, but is called career assessment or guidance.
In a context where we're all formatted, conditioned, standardized and influenced, there's a lot to unravel to make sure you make a reasoned choice, but first and foremost what we're interested in working on is questioning, then validating, what you like and what's important to you. Sometimes we want something for the wrong reasons, and we believe certain things are important when they're not.
The beauty of coaching is that it's a problem-solving, action-oriented method that adapts to every context, situation and personality. Wherever you are in your thinking process, whether you've already spent hours on it or very little time, whether you think you know what you want to do as a career or are totally lost, my role is to adapt and help you validate and make your choice.
I'll also be able to suggest open-ended exercises that won't influence you, and that I've been able to develop and refine over more than 19 years of helping students with their career choices, to help you bring out the elements that are important for you to think about.
It's your specific situation, reflection or problem that will generate the focus of the coaching. You may also have a related issue that can be addressed and resolved, whether it's self-confidence, motivation, concentration or organization problems, or any other type of difficulty where coaching can provide a solution.
Guidance coaching also has a major benefit: it makes you autonomous. The student is in a position to return to the subject on his or her own if new elements emerge after the coaching, because he or she has integrated the type of reflection required to get to the bottom of a question and make an informed choice.
We sometimes come up against a secondary issue when we choose a career, and I've seen students rule out a career simply because of a problem of self-confidence or shyness when speaking in public.
Sometimes, working on the main problem naturally leads us to question certain points which are external to the problem, but which are linked.
These career coaching sessions are designed to meet your needs, not just your desires.
I'm offering you a service that I consider essential. I'm proposing to guide you in this way for very specific reasons, which I'll explain below. I'm well aware that this is not ideally what you're looking for. On the other hand, it is ideally what you need.
In the vast majority of cases, students are looking for something quick and easy, which will give them a result that seems to suit their needs. But what they really need is to take an interest, to invest themselves in it, and to think for hours about the implications of their choices, what they really want and why, and what they really like and why, in order to be able to make a definitive choice. On the one hand he doesn't do much, on the other it's the other way around.
I consider it my duty as a professional to offer you what you need before anything else.
Let's take an example from everyday life to illustrate the situation: Imagine you go into a DIY store because you have a hole in a wall to fill. Would you prefer the sales assistant to direct you towards the product you say you want, or the one he'll recommend depending on what you have to do and the nature of your wall?
Either you know more than the salesperson, and this example is irrelevant, or you're not a DIY whiz, and you should trust the professional to guide you in choosing the tool/product best suited to the task at hand.
It's the same thing for your guidance, a subject with far more at stake. So why would coaching, and more specifically the type of coaching I've described above, be the best method?
To answer this question, we also need to talk about other methods, analyze their benefits and limitations, and make a comparison. I talk about this in my article on choosing a guidance service and choosing a coach, which I invite you to read. It would be far too long to go into detail in this presentation of the service. You can access it via the site menu. I also talk about it in much greater detail in my pamphlet "L'orientation aujourd'hui ou l'art de ne pas se planter" available on Amazon, kobo and Google Play, which you'll find a short presentation of in the "books" section of this site.
I offer you coaching that is totally centered on you and your own resources, based essentially on questioning, active listening and reformulation, projection and awareness, without any other tools or tests. Coaching whose only framework is the objective to be achieved, not the tool to be used.
Pupils and students are virtually on their own when it comes to all aspects of career guidance, except perhaps for knowledge of the different career paths, whether at high school or university, and they need more conscientious, personalized support to give them the best chance of blossoming!
Coaching for academic and professional orientation: the construction of a professional project
Generally speaking, what students want is quite simple: they want to find a career, and they don't realize that it's not just a matter of deciding: "I want to be an engineer" or "I want to be a lawyer".
Defining your orientation means first of all finding out what really interests you, then defining a precise career, and also specifying a sector, a field, a specialty. It's all about building your career plan.
My aim is to help you define what you want, and this can independently involve (re)discovering yourself, awakening your desires, what makes you tick, what you love, what makes you want to move forward, what excites you, motivates you, has meaning for you.
Many students who have a main interest or passion think they'll go in that direction. It's not a mistake in principle, but sometimes they tend not to anticipate that the reality of everyday life is far removed from the representation we make of it, and that it will have nothing to do with their experience of this passion, outside the framework of paid work. It's not uncommon for these students to question their choice. Then there are many young people who have no real passion, no real focus of interest, sometimes it's because they have too many, and none is really more important than the others, and sometimes it's constantly changing, from month to month, year to year. The status of a "passion" profession has long been perceived as an ideal goal, but this is not always the case.
And for all those who are hesitating between two choices, don't forget that double courses do exist!
For some students, particularly those with HPI, sometimes it's not a question of helping them to find their career, but rather of helping them to define the types of jobs they will least dislike, or in which they will least bother, the branch in which they can quickly change position, role or activity for example, and there's a real work of acceptance, of awareness to be implemented. Some people find it very hard to accept being confined to a single professional activity, and we need to find appropriate solutions. I know the specificities of these children and young adults very well, following my reading and research since around 2011, and I've had the pleasure of accompanying many of them.
The coaching services I offer meet these expectations and enable you to make concrete progress, step by step, in defining your career orientation.
I don't work with tests, but only with questioning and some open-ended projection exercises. You can refer to the section of this site on how guidance coaching works for more information.
My role is to adapt, to meet your expectations and to help you make your choices without influencing you.
Guidance coaching can be more or less focused:
- Choosing a career.
- Building a professional project.
- Choosing a university or school.
Our work will be tailored to your specific needs. Please consult the coaching process page for a more precise idea of the work undertaken.
The question of motivation and self-confidence
These issues are central to the definition of a career plan, as their impact and consequences can be limiting.
It is often necessary to work on these issues to ensure that the choice of career path is not affected.
When it's clear that the student isn't working, can't get down to work or is dropping out quickly. The problem is the cause of this lack of motivation, and this is what needs to be defined so that the student can move forward again. This is the kind of reflective work I undertake: helping them to find and express the cause, then helping them to find their own solutions. In most cases, it's a problem linked to orientation, a lack of purpose.
I'm only going to look at the question of self-confidence from the point of view of orientation. Self-confidence can have a profound effect on career choices.
It can be revealed through :
- fear of defining a goal,
- fear of making the choice to achieve that goal,
- tendency to doubt one's abilities, value and skills,
- tendency to think he'll fail,
- shyness, fear or discomfort with public speaking,
- fear of facing the gaze and judgment of others,
- fear of disappointing parents,
- fear of trying too hard and failing,
- fear of not being intelligent enough,
- fear of realizing one's limits.
Of course, there are certain redundancies and this list is not exhaustive, but it is intended to illustrate.
Depending on the personalities involved and the issues at stake, we may approach the work from different angles, but a first stage of reflection and awareness of oneself, one's experiences and one's history is necessary, and this is what will invariably guide the work.
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