3 Stages in Collection, Planning and Dissemination of Career Information

Let us now tap into means of collection, planning and dissemination of career information as part of career guidance. It is basic that anybody found engaged in a long lasting job called career would have explanation to give on how he came about joining such a job. Some people display happiness and contentment while others regret to find themselves in the particular career either because their goal in the career cannot be accomplished or for the fact that the demands they have to meet are incongruent with their expectations and resources.

Most people who are in teaching career often show regret and disappointment simply for economic reasons whereas members in the law, medical and engineering profession seems to be happier. It is however a common knowledge to find lawyers changing to the teaching or pasturing careers simply because they feel they are not comfortable with the conditions or demands of their career in law. All these point to the fact that there is a need to plan, collect and be accessible to relevant information that are needed before a decision is taken on which career to pursue in life.

Meaning of Career

Career is a life long activity. It is a chosen life work or an overall work one does in a given job in one’s lifetime. Career includes the different types of work you do as a teacher, the different types of positions you occupy in teaching throughout your life in teaching. If your career is teaching, you will find yourself doing other jobs like marking examination scripts, sporting activities, gardening and prep supervision. At other times, you occupy the position of class teacher, assistant headmaster/mistress, headmaster/mistress, NUT official, schools inspector. All these are part of teaching career.

Collection of Career Information

It is essential for the counsellor or career master to gather sufficient facts, possess sound knowledge and ideas about different careers for him to be able to assist students in their career decision making process. The two major areas of importance where information is needed for career guidance are:

• Information about self
• Information about the career of interest.
Information about Self – i.e. person who wants to choose a career. Although self assessment is needed by an individual in areas which include:

(i) Area of his interest;
(ii) The type of person he is. Is he an introvert or extrovert, aggressive or lovely person? You need to know this.
(iii) The educational background of the person. (iv) The performance in the school subjects.
All these you need to know about the person for a good career decision making.
Information about the Career of Interest – You will gather information on career of interest by considering the following:

(1) Study of occupational information that are available in publications like:

(a) Periodicals in Ministry of Employment, Labour and Productivity;
(b) Books, Periodicals and Magazines by Labour Unions/Associations/Organisations/Institutes;
(c) Business and Commercial Publishers; and
(d) Magazines, newspaper publications on job vacancies.

(2) Use of films, filmstrips, slides, etc. which present occupational information.
(3) Use of career exploration kits and career games.
(4) Personal visit to employers in the fields of interest. (5) Interviewing workers in occupations.
(5) Securing part-time or long vacation jobs in occupations of interest.
(6) Scanning newspapers and magazines for information on occupations.

Career Planning

Planning is time tabling of how activities will be carried out. In planning, attention should be paid to material resources that are available for use in carrying out the plans. In a similar way, one needs to make a time-table of how he wants to get into the type of work one intends to do in the future.

The planning of the type of work one wants to do in the future involves acquiring the necessary education needed and taking the type of subjects to qualify one for the job. It also involves preparing your mind towards the job. All these are part of career planning. You should consider the following points while you are engaged in the career planning exercise:

1. Quality of education provided by the client’s parent.
2. Peer-group influence on the client’s life.
3. Type of school attended i.e. a student who attended a teacher training college has already been prepared to be a teacher.
4. Subject combination i.e. a child who wants to be a medical doctor should offer subjects like physics, chemistry and biology.
5. Prospect of employment.
6. Prestige of the career of interest.
7. Economic gains to be derived from a career. Most people plan for career that attract high salary while others look for retirement benefits, allowances, holidays etc.
8. Safety – Most people prefer careers that involve limited amount of hazard so that they can live long and in good health. There are other careers that involve great deal of hazards which can suddenly terminate life like military, industrial engineering. All these are important for the counsellor and student clients to consider in the process of career guidance.

However, Career guidance holds out an attractive promise for the vocationally confused persons. The job market increasingly becomes tighter everybody; job hunting is quite a job even for people with employable skills. By offering job-hunting skills and vocational information to youth, guidance and counselling as an educational service plays a significance role Denga (2004).

According to Onyejiaku (2001) in career guidance should not wait until the tail end of any level of formal education. It should start in time, almost immediately a child enters school. It should not be divorced from the child’s development, rather it should constitute the integral aspect of that on-going process, hence, it should have its rightful place in the school curriculum.

Vocational theories regarding psychological and non-psychological factors of occupational choice should form the bases of entry into any job. These theories are interpreted by the counsellor to help the counsellee (student) make decisions. Decision – making competency is very crucial in an individual life posited that the vocational theories help the counsellor decide what data to gather about the potential vocational environments and the importance of students (client) action, interest, values, personality, educational experience and stated aspirations.

Dissemination of Career Information

As a counsellor or career master, you should be able to make available, present, interpret and explain all the facts, ideas and other data already collected about occupations to the students. This can be done by considering the following:

1. Establishment of career resource material centre where career materials are carefully organised and made available. The Centre should be composed of:

(a) occupational descriptions;
(b) occupational outlook projections;
(c) post-secondary educational and training information;
(d) apprenticeship and internship information;
(e) information for special populations, and
(f) financial aid information.

2. Lending to students, all career related materials.
3. Organisation of career days, field trips, parent conferences, career club, work study/tour, work experiences and library.
4. Counselling interview (individual or group) through the use of audio-visual, tape recorders, overhead projectors, flannel graph and magnetic board, bulletin board, films and filmstrips, periodic announcements and career education.
5. Guidance on choice of appropriate subject combination that is congruent with choice of particular career of interest.
6. Provide specific information about each occupation with reference to:

(a) Definition;
(b) Work performed;
(c) Personal requirements; and
(d) Training opportunities and entry requirements.

Stages in Career Planning, Collection of and Dissemination of Information

Three basic areas to be considered here are the fantasy, tentative and realistic stage.

The Fantasy stage refers to the period when one is still day- dreaming about many careers that are attractive to an individual.

At this stage, a person acts like a child who wants to have everything shown to him/her. Fantasy stage means that the individual wants to be a lawyer today, tomorrow it is teaching career s/he wants, the next day it is accounting s/he wants. It is actually a period of confusion for the individual.

Tentative stage occurs when the individual begins to get settled down to a career that appeals to them. For example, if in a fantasy stage s/he has about careers that appealed to him, at the tentative stage, s/he may settle down to consider seriously may be only five or six. S/He then begins to plan for these careers, some of them, s/he may drop later.

The Realistic stage. At this stage, the individual is mature to make a concrete decision of the type of career s/he thinks is good for him or her. By this stage, all the factors affecting career planning as indicated earlier have been considered. The individual is now convinced that possibly going into teaching career is best for him or her. The choice becomes realistic because they would have considered the type of education they have, the school subjects taken and the possibility of getting quickly employed.

Every individual in the process of planning, collecting and using information goes through the above mentioned stages. Any counselling interaction should be used for assisting clients, after gathering all the necessary information to enhance career decision making process.

The use of Tests in Career Guidance

There is an overwhelming number of tests which may be used in career guidance. Using a classification, which in various forms has a very long history; tests can be divided into three main categories, namely: tests of ability, of personality, and tests of attitudes and interests.

Ability tests can in turn be divided into two main sections, often called achievement tests and aptitude tests. A distinction between these two, is often difficult to sustain, but is considered to depend on the idea that achievement tests are usually of school subjects – English, Mathematics, Economics and so on and are used after a period of deliberate teaching of that subject, while aptitude tests are more abstract and aim to test thought processes and ideas which are common to and generalised from a wide range of subject and other learning.

The intelligence test is the most widely known type of aptitude test. In all cases, aptitude tests are used to predict future performance of the person being tested. Tests of ability have been used very widely in all forms of guidance in schools.

Personality tests have a chequered history in careers guidance. This is probably due to the very elusive concept of personality, which is usually taken to mean the relatively constant emotional qualities of a person, his major needs and drives whether conscious or unconscious. But over and above, problems of definition, Adedipe (1986) shows that, there has been extreme difficulty in establishing a clear dependable relation between any test estimate of personality and a work setting. Perhaps the most useful type of personality test in careers guidance work is the self- report in careers.

Attitude tests in careers have been widely developed; there is a tendency for such tests to be specific to research problems rather than for general use. Super and Overstreet (1960) have used such tests in an interesting way in their study of vocationally maturity.

Interest tests on the other hand have been widely developed. In recent years, interest tests have been revised and developed in Zambia. Tests such as Bakare’s “Vocational Interest Inventory” (VIT), Akinboye’s “Vocational Interest Data Inventory” (APDI) and Adedipe’s “Self Evaluation of Vocational Interest (SEVI) are a few examples of tests used in Zambian schools. All of these aim at exploring the personal interests of the client, and comparing the pattern of interests with that of people in general or with patterns commonly found in occupational groups.