Vocational Guidance
Definition of Vocational Guidance
“The vocation bureau is intended to aid young people in choosing an occupation, preparing themselves for it finding an opening in for it and building up a career of efficiency and success”. – Frank Pearson
“The vocational guidance is the process of assisting individuals to choose an occupation, prepare for it, and enter upon, and progress in it. It is concerned primarily with helping individuals make decisions and choices involved in planning a future and building a career decision, and choices necessary in affecting satisfactory vocational adjustment”. – National Vocational Guidance Association of America 1937
Need and importance of guidance?
According to Myer’s, Vocational guidance is needed because of the following reasons:
• Human potentialities are utilized to a maximum with the help of vocational guidance. We are then truly benefitted by it.
• I f a n i n d i v i d u a l s t a y s i n a w r o n g p r o f e s s i o n f o r a t i m e , h e s u f f e r s e c o n o m i c a l l y – t h e r e i s a financial loss.
• It is needed from the point of view of the health of the workers. If the profession is such where the health of social workers
breaks down, production suffers, and the morale of workers goes down.
• Vocational guidance provides many economic advantages to employers. Their problems are less because the workers enjoy job
satisfaction.
• If an individual stays in the wrong profession, he suffers from psychic loss. The individual is not happy. He is frustrated. His
family life is affected.
• There are many personal and social values of vocational guidance. Leaving aside financial considerations, the worker's
happiness, personal development, value as a social unit, and contribution to human welfare are all involved.
Proper vocational guidance helps us to achieve that.
Purpose of Vocational Guidance :
a. To serve the individual and the society
b. To prevent maladjustment and dissatisfaction
c. To ensure efficient use of man power
Aim:
• providing a follow-up service to help him /her to implement those plans.
• providing counseling to promote self-understanding and develop educational and occupational plans.
• providing a placement service to help him/her implement those plans.
• enabling the individual to discover information about himself/herself, his/her abilities, interests, needs, ambitions, limitations,
and causes.
• providing him/her with a frame of reference in which to see himself/herself in relation to these educational and vocational
opportunities; to orient him/ her to the helping agencies available, and to alert him /her to future decision-making points in
his/her career.
• providing him/her with information about his/her environment, the advantages and disadvantages of different occupations and
educational courses, the qualifications necessary for entry into them, and the total range of opportunities available to him/her
in theory and practice.
Vocational guidance at the First Stage:
a. Create the habit of neat and systematic work.
b. Create love and respect – a positive attitude toward normal work.
c. Encourage neatness in work.
d. Train the use of the hands of the child.
e. Encourage the development of good relations amongst themselves.
f. Create and achieve hand-eye coordination.
Vocational guidance at the Second Stage:
a. helping pupils according to their vocational assets and liabilities
b. helping pupils to get suitable jobs
c. helping pupils to prepare themselves for entry into the careers of their choice
d. helping pupils to be familiar with occupations and their requirements
e. helping pupils to be familiar with vocational implications of different subjects to be studied in secondary
school.
Vocational Guidance Strategies:
SOME OF THE COMMON STRATEGIES:
• Vocational guidance services should be based on the principle of individual differences.
• The selection of a particular vocation is not confined to a single, fixed decision, but a time extending process, involving a
series of social and personal factors.
• Different strategies need to be used to cater to the individual vocational needs of students.
• The individual needs to understand the total perspective of a vocation for which he has decided to prepare himself.
• Vocational guidance services must fulfill the vocational needs of every student.
• Occupation is to be looked at as a source of income for people and a major source of satisfying needs and optimizing aptitudes,
competencies and interests.
THENMOZHI, C. Vocational Guidance and Its Strategies. Shanlax International Journal of Education, 2018, vol. 7, no 1, p. 20-23.