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Guidance and Counseling

Notes 6.7 Vocational Guidance

The recognition of the fact that education should equip the individual to enter an occupation and
be able to make a living, makes vocational counseling an integral part of the educational process.
Thus counseling in the educational setting cannot be comprehensively and purposefully rendered
without including counseling towards vocational development. Therefore, educational and
vocational counseling are together provided to both school and college-going students.
We may recall that the counseling movement had its origin in the vocational guidance movement.
Thus it was the forerunner of counseling psychology. A few years before the end of the last
century, Jessie B. Davis (1898) started this movement. He set up an Educational Career Counselling
Centre in Detroit in 1898. Within a decade after this pioneering venture, Eli Weaver (1907)
published his book Choosing a Career in 1908 and Frank Parsons started the Vocational Bureau of
Boston. Later, his book Choosing a Vocation was published. These reflect the early interest of
educators and social workers in the vocational development of youth.

ORIENTATION COUNSELING

PLACEMENT PUPIL
INVESTMENT

PUPIL
FOLLOW UP INFORMATION

Fig. 6.1 Operation Area of Guidance (Function)
It will be helpful if the counselor is knowledgeable and has the necessary information concerning
how individuals develop vocationally. Such information, if available to the counselor in the
process of counseling, makes the choosing of a career easier and simple.Vocational guidance has
been defined, firstly, as “the process of assisting the individual to choose an occupation, prepare
for it, enter upon and progress in it. It is concerned primarily with helping individuals make
decisions and choice involved in planning a future and building career-decisions and choices
necessary in affecting satisfactory vocational adjustment. It is the process of assistance only,
given to an individuals in solving problems related to occupational choices and progress with
due regard the individual characteristics and their relation to occupational opportunity. It is the
process of helping a person to develop and accept an integrated and adequate picture of his self
and of his role in the world of work, to ests this concept against reality with satisfaction to

60 LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY