Career Counseling In Companies

Career Counseling In Companies
In this fast paced corporate world, career counseling has become extremely important. Companies are increasingly facing a higher attrition rate. An employee could leave the company due to various reasons. The reasons could include low salary, lack of growth opportunities, lack of interesting work or more of routine work, incompatibility with co workers, fights with boss, bad work timings, lack of office facilities, improper office atmosphere, etc.

The ultimate goal of career counseling is to decrease the attrition rate and to help the employees. After career counseling is completed totally for an employee and he/she gets a new role in the company, which he/she likes, it will increase his/her job satisfaction. The self confidence and self esteem of the employee will increase as a result of career counseling. This will in turn reflect in the employee s work and thus the overall productivity of the employee will increase. This will increase the productivity of the employee s department and of the overall company in general. Happier employees will reduce the turnover rate. A happy and satisfied employee brings new enthusiasm to the work place. He/she brings fresh ideas and thinks out of the box. An unsatisfied employee will simply crib and carry on with routine work. An employee who is satisfied at work will work better with his/her colleagues and perform better in teams. A happy employee will show better leadership skills and take more initiatives, which an unhappy employee will not do. These are some of the many benefits which career counseling will bring in the workplace and help the employees who undergo the program.

We have discussed the benefits of career counseling. But there are some potential obstacles to the benefits mentioned there. An employee after getting new training for the new department could simply leave the company for another. He/she may get a better position elsewhere with the new training. This obstacle could be overcome by making the employee sign a contract/bond for 6 months or 12 months. Thus attrition rate will be either constant or lower than before.

Another point of concern is, when an employee leaves his/her old department and joins a new department, the original (old) department could face a shortage of people or talent shortage. This can be overcome easily. The transition of an employee to a new department will be made by a committee, consisting of seniors from old department, new department, HR and the career counselors. They will ensure that the employee does a proper handover to the old department employees. The employee could work part time in both departments for a few weeks before making a complete move to the new department. This can keep away chaos.

One could think that productivity won t really increase if an employee undergoes career counseling. This may/could be true in the short term. But in the long term, career counseling will only help the employee, the department and the company. A happy and satisfied employee in a new work position is any day better than an unhappy and unsatisfied employee in the old job. Thus the benefits of career counseling for an employee outweigh any obstacles or issues that may crop up.


career, career counseling, attrition
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