I’ve been working in England for just over a year now, as a private career guidance coach as well as freelancing as a career guidance consultant in schools. I’m really enjoying meeting so many wonderful year 11, year 12 and year 13 students.

The schools I work in are in London and South East of England. Most schools prefer the independent career guidance coaches to come to the school and see their students face-to-face. That said, one or two schools I’ve worked for have been happy for the careers meetings to take place remotely, using online meetings platforms. This works particularly well when a school isn’t in a central location and easily accessible.

I think the beauty of there being a program that brings independent career guidance professionals into the schools is that there is a high degree of impartiality. This is essential and a fundamental of the system that operates in the UK. I work in close liaison, of course, with the school-based career guidance teams and we are all working with one objective in mind; to benefit each student in their career path decision-making.

In school-based work the student you meet is utterly unknown to you. This is great, as you then have nothing to go on as to what they enjoy, what they are studying, anything at all! Each conversation is different and what’s key to how successful the brief one-on-one session will be, depends on the core skills that we bring as experienced consultants: to assume nothing; listen with empathy and unconditional positive regard; to ask lots of open questions; to take detailed notes, and to carefully walk the student through relevant resources. We don’t have long in these consultations.

There’s a clear objective for the sessions – it’ll be to help them to pick their subjects, or to look into options for studies, apprenticeships, or work, beyond year-13. We use key resources such as the Morrisby Online Career Assessment, or Unifrog. My personal preference is to use the Morrisby tool. For one thing, it doesn’t come with the presumption that university is part of the journey of the individual, which is implied by the title of Unifrog – this might be off-putting for some individuals. Both of these resources are powerful psychometric tools and are user-friendly, but when I work privately I will typically offer the Morrisby Online Career Assessment. It is so comprehensive and highly interactive.