THE EFFECTIVENESS OF CAREER COUNSELLING AMONG ADOLESCENTS; AN APPROACH TO PROMOTE CAREER DECISION ABILITY

Abstract

In order to identify a path to their profession, adolescents constantly look into their interests and skills. However, because the job marketplace is always changing, many adolescents struggle to locate the ideal career, which has a significant negative impact on their decision making ability. Adolescents can find the ideal career that matches their interests and abilities with the aid of career counseling and can improve their their decision making abilities. The primary goal of the study was to determine whether adolescent decision-making is impacted by choosing an unsuitable career. It sought to investigate how career counseling affected decision-making and career indecision in adolescents. To investigate the study's hypothesis, 55 adolescents aged (12-19) years participated in the study. Through purposive sampling, the data was gathered from 1 school and 1 degree college of Rawalpindi. The participants were asked to complete Career Decision Scale (Samuel et al., 1976) and The Career Decision-Making Difficulties Questionnaire (Gati et al., 1996) before and after 4 weeks of career counseling. To determine the effectiveness of career counseling and to check the possibility of formulated hypotheses, Paired Sample T-test and Independent sample t-test were used. The results showed that all the study's variables had satisfactory reliability (=.62 to.89) in pretest and post-test of the study. The results further showed that after career counseling, career decision making difficulty had a marked decrease, however, an increase in career decision-making ability is illustrated. Moreover, group comparisons showed that females tend to have strong career decision making ability comparative to males. The present study serves to pave a pathway for mental health professionals and aware educational institutions to work on career counseling of students and help them improve their abilities. These results, in particular, emphasize the need for additional research and techniques to solve this issue.