Career indecision

Career indecision is a large issue in today's society. I was fortunate enough to know I wanted to go into education I just didn't know which subject or grade level. My experiences throughout my own schooling pointed me into the area of early childhood and special education. However, even only being a teacher for two years, I have finally saw first hand how education has changed. Everyone talks about it, however, I thought, "How bad could it be?" Politics and money are now an important part of education, not so much the kids. I started teaching for the kids. That is why my career is transforming into career counseling. I am still being a part of education and schools, however, I am focusing on the students. Not standardize testing, not my teacher evaluation, the students.

My students grow up in a high poverty area, where they face many struggles that a typical children should not have to go through. Also, many students I teach do not even think about what kind of future they can have. In the beginning of my first year as a teacher I did an exercise to ask students what they would like to be when they grow up, which I thought would be fun and the students would get creative. However, as the exercise continued, students had a hard time coming up with what they wanted to be. I began to ask questions about what their parents do for a living. I quickly found out that more than half of my students' parents are unemployment. I did not think of this before having the students complete the exercise. Without a background of knowledge of types of careers, it is difficult to start thinking of different possible careers in one's future. The lack of knowledge my students have about possible career opportunities they could be a part of upsets me and fuels my passion for career development.

Each person has a different story or theme of their life. Sarvickas notices that in the process of Life-Theme Counseling. The five steps figure in life events in order to figure out a client's theme and use the theme to check how the theme relates to the client's indecisiveness. Then looking at the parts of the themes that related to a future career. This process relates directly to finding out each person's story individually to figure out a client's meaning and then use that to figure out a career path.


Savickas, M.L. (1998). Career style assessment and counseling. In T. Sweeney (Ed.), Adlerian counseling: A practitioner’s approach (4^th ed, p. 329-360). Philadelphia, PA: Accelerated Development Press.