Your questions about career counseling

Can you share examples of the most important questions and answers from counseling sessions? What is it that you discuss with people? 

Specific questions vary a lot, but here are some topics that keep coming up, with defining one’s career strategy and wanting another perspective on application documents being the most common. This list shows the topics in the order in which they most likely arise in the process:

• Self-assessment: defining where you are standing at the moment, identifying your competencies, interests, and career goals
• Career planning: exploring options, defining your way forward, identifying the information you need to take decisions, finding strategies to get that information or getting inspired for the next career step
• Application process: understanding what a company is looking for and how you include the relevant information in your documents, or convince them of your competencies in an interview
• Decision and negotiation: deciding between options or under which circumstances you want to accept an offer

Answers vary even more; there are probably as many answers as people I counselled. And this is why I love my job, it is so interesting to see how people think and take decisions, how interests, goals and personal values vary, and how the same process is different for each and every one of us. Thus, you are, and always will be, the expert of yourself and your career. This is also why I will guide you to find your own answers and solutions, rather than providing standard solutions (yes, that is a nice way of saying that you are doing a large part of the work – without having to do it alone). I can show the company perspective or share my knowledge and experience, creating an atmosphere that allows you to explore what it is that you want. Compare this to doing measurements at someone else’s beamline or in someone else’s lab with a scientist who knows their instrument, is an expert on the method and can provide ideas and advice, share best practices and make sure you are safe, while you still need to put in the effort of preparing your samples, doing the measurements and analyzing the data yourself.

What if I find it hard to formulate my question? 

Remember how you learned formulating good research hypotheses? Most likely, it was an iterative process of defining a question based on a vague idea of what may be interesting, thinking about it, then redefining the question, discarding everything after talking to a colleague or supervisor, defining a new question, and reformulating it again as you wrote it down in a proposal or research plan. We accept this as a normal process in research. The same applies to your career-related questions – come with the thoughts you have, and we can define the actual question together.   

What can I expect from a counseling session? 

Probably, one of my first questions will be what brought you here and what you want to achieve with me. Then, we take it from where you are, with your questions and concerns that brought you to the session, or new questions that come to mind as we talk. We will adapt to whatever you need to move forward in your career journey, whether that is getting a clearer picture of your competencies and interests, finding strategies to gather relevant information, defining your next career step(s), going through the details of your application documents, or coming up with a good answer to a feared interview question. I will not tell you what to do, as in give you job advertisements you should apply for or decide on your behalf, nor write your application. What I can do, is offer new ideas and perspectives, ask the right questions (just like you learned which methods to use for a specific research endeavor, I am trained to use conversation techniques that have proven useful for the topics above), or go through that decision making process with you one step at a time (there are tools for this, too, similar to the procedures you use in the lab).   

And what will I talk to you for an entire hour? 

Whatever is useful to you, as long as it is career-related… and no worries, while most people are happy to use this time, I do not force you to be there for longer than what you consider useful ;)

Additional questions? Email them and they will be included in a future post.