How Do You Know When It's Time To Go?

Career counseling may be the fastest growing career in the counseling field. More than 5,000 counselors are members of the National Career Development Association. A growing collection of nonprofit organizations have become innovative sources of advice. And there's always the career factories -- not headhunters or outplacement firms (that's not what we mean by career counseling), but mass-market companies that specialize in aptitude tests, skills measurement, and other tools.

Judith Waterman, a career counselor in San Mateo, California, and a well-published expert in the field, has seen her client base shift dramatically over the last 20 years. She built her business around providing advice to "reentry women." Her next wave of clients were middle managers shaken about their career prospects. Now it's executives who are worrying less about the fast track than about the right track. And they're worrying more openly than ever.

"During the 1980s," she reports, "I was seeing high achievers who were thinking, 'How did I get here and why am I not happy?' But they were keeping it under wraps. Today career counseling is more like marriage counseling. It's more acceptable."

Betsy Collard, program director of the "Career Action Center" in Silicon Valley, one of the country's leading nonprofit career groups, documents just how acceptable. The center's 22 counselors see more than 300 people a month. Few of their clients, Collard says, fit the stereotype of the 50-something Organization Man downsized into despair. Her clients are younger, on the rise -- and still looking for something different.

"Part of this has to do with how personally knowledge workers view their work and the meaning of it," she explains. "But it also has to do with the chaos going on in the economy. In times of change, everybody turns inward to get clear about what's important to them, who they are, and what they want out of this."

Welcome to the new world of career counseling. Lots of people are doing it. Most people still haven't considered it. Should you? As you evaluate this career-management tool, it makes sense to focus on three basic questions:

When should I consider seeing a career counselor?

What do career counselors do?

How can I choose a counselor who's right for me?

When Should I See a Counselor?

First the wrong answer: After I quit my job.

Then the just-slightly-less-wrong-answer: When I'm so miserable I can't imagine staying at my job.

So how do you know when it's time to go to a counselor? "The new model is really built on wellness," Betsy Collard says. "Because the job environment is changing so rapidly, you shouldn't just think about going to a career counselor when you're in pain -- when the job isn't working and you have a values conflict and you aren't happy. You should also go in to develop a plan for staying fit. Find a way to work career fitness into your everyday life."

That may be expecting too much from a generation of people who are famously overstretched and always out of time. But the advice threshold, most counselors agree, should be far short of utter despair. And why not? There's not much to lose, as long as you don't fall prey to the scams that always plague growth fields like this. Most career counselors charge between $75 and $150 an hour. You can't generate real insights in one visit, but four or five may be enough. That means you can get serious career advice from a highly regarded expert for a total investment of $350 to $750.

So when do you see a counselor? "You benefit from it when your career trajectory is not what you thought it would be, or you're stuck on a plateau," says William Pollack, a psychologist and partner at Spectrum O.E.D., a Boston-area consulting firm that specializes in executive development. "You can't do without it when your work is suffering or you're dreading going to work. Because then, the alternative to well-timed career counseling is going to be outplacement."

Of course the question of when to see a counselor really begs the question of why: What motivates people to seek career advice? Far and away the biggest issue, counselors agree, is "values clarification" -- a search to match what feels satisfying and worthwhile with what you actually do.

Howard Figler, a Ph.D. psychologist and the author of The Complete Job-Search Handbook, has a private counseling practice in Sacramento, California. He likes to call career counselors doctors of purpose. "Purpose should be at the core of your career no matter what you do," Figler says.

Ilise Gold, a change management specialist in Westport, Connecticut, provides career advice in two ways: companies hire her to counsel their executives, and she also sees about 30 private clients a week. Gold says most of her individual clients come to her "when two things are missing: values and integrity." Her sessions revolve around three simple questions: "What's going right? What's going wrong? What did you imagine your life being that's missing?"