When College Doesn’t Work Out
In the manicured suburbs of Shoreline, Connecticut, where I have spent the last quarter-century advising families, few phone calls carry more raw distress than this one: “Daryl, he’s coming home. He stopped going to classes, he failed his midterms, and he packed up his dorm room yesterday.” For upper-middle-class parents, that call feels like a […]
Stumbling In Early Adulthood: Career Counseling Connecticut Can Help
“Are you old enough to know the Rocky story?” Parents are – or at least the sequels. Rocky lost in the first movie. But he was a winner because he climbed up from what I call a Path of Disaster. Then, of course, he went on to win in the sequels. People love a good […]
Career Counseling Connecticut: Training Our Clients In Exploratory Work
Stephen Covey of 7 Habits of Highly Effective People fame popularized a time management quadrant: Important-Urgent; Important Not-Urgent; Urgent-Not Important; Not Urgent-Not Important. While most will discover that not everything fits neatly into each box, there are distinct examples for each: Most of Career Counseling Connecticut’s clients have done very minimal exploratory career work. Most […]
Launching your child into a career
David looked at me with exasperation: “I know they mean well. But I don’t want to answer another question.” He meant his kind parents. I only know most clients through a working relationship. But I know David through a long friendship with his Dad. We both know his Dad is a really nice guy, and […]
Career Counseling Connecticut: How good careers stop more difficult problems
I remember when Paul, one of the most promising attorneys I knew, seemed to shift. He was in between work, as the law firm where he worked imploded. This was not due to him. Just bad luck. I spoke with him on the phone a few months later. He was slurring his words. We were […]
The Post College Jobless Fall…
Parents, if you have a post-college child who is jobless right now, I understand the fear. It’s beyond simply practical issues. You’ll notice a real, observable downward shift in their happiness level. Commiseration doesn’t provide much solace, but I see it all the time — a reasonable number of young adults find themselves unemployed the […]
Your young adult needs a mentor
Most young adults are starved for mentoring. Parents cannot be mentors. While there might be a few outliers, it’s nearly impossible for a parent to give advice that a young adult hears as unfiltered by judgment or evaluation. It’s simply the nature of the parent-child dynamic. Even if a parent says the exact same thing […]
Yes, college counseling should include career counseling
My work in career counseling emanated from a mission to help young people transition into adulthood. Historically, the handoff from high school to college put parents at ease, because they assumed that from there, the kid would either figure it out or a job would be waiting for them on the other end. Neither is […]
Career Counseling Connecticut Provides Career help for your college student
Career planning offices at colleges are very good for one area: providing resources in an organized way that students can leverage to contact potential employers and alumni. Sometimes they have counselors who can provide generic, but part-of-the-college-tuition-package, advice on resumes and interviews. None that I know provide good counseling on what someone should do for […]
First job – not great? Career Counseling Connecticut can help
The First Job Pivot: When the Career That Was Supposed to Launch You Ends Instead A pattern has become increasingly common in the calls I get from parents: a young adult lands their first real job, everyone breathes a sigh of relief, and then — sometimes within weeks, sometimes within a year — it falls […]