Counseling for Career Growth: Re-thinking Models of Career Counseling

Counseling for Career Growth: Re-thinking Models of Career Counseling Center for Immigrant Education and Training ACE LaGuardia Community College

Hotel T.E.A.C.H. (Teaching English and Careers in Hospitality) • Develop skills and knowledge necessary to move from “back of the house” to “front of the house” positions

Curriculum Focus • Contextualized ESOL • Career Counseling • Technology

Do the Work Work within the Big Picture EFF Broad Areas of Responsibility: Plan and Direct Personal and Professional Growth Work with Others

Models for Curriculum Development • Start from descriptions of skills to be learned • Start from where the students are • Do both

Employer Expectations • Taking Initiative • Being Professional • Going “above and beyond” when providing customer service

Students’ Realities: “What the students taught us.” • Students felt invisible, looked down upon, unimportant. • The work itself is exceptionally hard. • Students felt unappreciated by customers and supervisors.

Hotel T.E.A.C.H. Student Demographics • 59% of class was age 45 or older. • A majority of the students were professionals in their home countries. • Most had been in their “back of the house” positions for 10+ years with no advancement.

Internal Barriers to Success • Embarrassment at their low English proficiency • Overwhelmed with their language limitations • Felt incompetent and inarticulate

“The counseling roots of career counseling” • Allows students to express themselves in a safe, supportive, and non-judgmental environment • Helps students identify non-helpful behavior patterns • Students learn and develop appropriate coping skills • Students identify goals that are important to them

“Emotional Intelligence” as a Promising Approach • Recognize and monitor our own feelings (Self-awareness) • Recognize the feeling of others • Self-Management: Capacity for effectively managing one’s motives and regulating one’s behavior. Also allows one to manage responses to both one’s own emotions and those of others.

Teaching Emotional Intelligence • Reflect and Analyze current behavior and attitudes • Develop alternative approaches to their behavior and identify ways to improve • Use rubrics, case studies & role-plays • Extension activities and Journaling

Evaluation Findings Participants and Supervisors • High level of satisfaction. • Most demonstrated greater confidence and ease in common customer service situations.

Students reported: They learned “to work with anger and stress”, were better able to interact with others in a “professional way”, and had become “less emotional” both at work and outside work.

Lessons Learned • Curriculum development that is both “outside in” and “inside out” • Focus on both language and behavior as well as beliefs

Rethink traditional models of “career counseling” • Emotional Intelligence and Social Intelligence skills can, and need to be, taught

Counseling for Career Growth: Re-thinking Models of Career Counseling