Guidance versus Advice

In my Careers Service there seems to be a feeling that the real deal is ‘guidance’ and ‘advice’ isa bad or suspect or inferior thing. My uderstanding is that ‘Guidance’ covers information and education and advice – and counselling. Actually I think that people who use Guidance in this ’superior’ way actually mean counselling. Enabling clients to arrive at their own solutions by skilled questioning.

Advice is undervalued. Advice is actually a bit scarier than counselling. It means deploying a knowledge base to influence the judgement of the client. Its the ‘influencing’ bit that gets people worried. I do not see why. To influence is not the same as making up some-one’s mind for them. It does mean selecting relevant data to feed into the client’s decision making process. What this data is varies enormously and the utilisation of it should be governed by ‘judgement’.

Such judgement can exist side by side with impartiality. The data that is used can be arranged on both sides of a choice. The advantages of this choice are ….. the disadvantages are………

 

 

 

C2 Session Review your Career Direction

Did the ‘Review your Career Direction’ Session. Not happy with the format. Will propose a new session based on Action Learning. The problem is that i don’t really believe in the exercises – particularly not in a live session. Found it difficult to switch from reflection to discussion /  interaction.

Alos i felt the clients were well beyond the sort of self assessment prescribed – or may be I just felt it was all rather lumbering and slow.

 

Interviewed by a website

OK so it doesn’t excite you, but I quite liked this crew of 3 from some communications consultancy coming over to record my views on careers. One of them came on a motor bike in true ad agency style. The other two carried the lighting camera and recording kit. There was no shortage of stuff to say but what did I actually say. Like so much of my life I have only the sketchiest recolection. Hope they can do something with it. I have always felt we should do more of this – no one really knows what guidance is, some think they know and most of them think its crap. I tried to give a sense of the craft of guidance – not a topic you see talked about very much.