International School Counsellors' Series 2023

Series 2023 

This year, the inaugural Study Australia School Counsellors’ Series brought together international school careers counsellors, principals, teachers and student advisers from around the world to hear from experts based in New Zealand, Switzerland, Australia and India. 

To date, the series has attracted nearly 500 registrations for live sessions on careers advising, transitions to international tertiary studies and emerging careers. Thank you for your participation in the live events, engagement with our speakers through Q&A and take-up of the opportunity to watch and share the recordings. 

All three sessions, held in March, June and September 2023, are now available to watch below. 

Session 1 replay

The critical ingredients of quality career development programs (March 2023)

In this first session of our three-part professional development series for International School Counsellors, Dr Michael Healy from CareerEd discussed the critical ingredients of quality career development programs.

Further comments from Dr Healy

Following our first session, our guest speaker, Dr Michael Healy from CareerED, shared responses to the live questions we did not have time to answer in the session. Please see his responses below.

With your experience, do career assessments help in identifying the skills/interests of the student?

Yes, they are a crucial tool to help clients understand themselves better. There are many great career assessments in career development. The important thing is that we don’t consider the results to be the final answer, but rather the starting point of some reflection and discussion. Here is a great list of some free, high quality, career assessments.

Top advice for parents in this area of their child's development?

My main advice is to encourage exploration and open-mindedness, rather than decisions. Exploration has been proven to support better decision-making and has the added benefit of increasing the scope of options and for young people, rather than narrowing them down. People who explore different ideas are going to be more adaptable and optimistic. Of course, to support exploration means we need to be comfortable with them trying new things, which may feel risky or uncertain, and to make mistakes.

I often go back to this quote from a famous career development scholar, John Krumboltz: “we should keep in mind that being undecided might really mean that one has adopted a profound philosophical perspective that some believe leads to health and happiness. Open-mindedness can be viewed as a virtue. Keeping one’s options open may be far preferable to stating goals which may or may not be possible of attainment and which could lead to frustration and unhappiness.”.

I'm career counsellor for high school students and I found it can be a bit different kind of communications as opposed to college students or adults. Considering they might not be experienced nor mature enough to talk deep, would you suggest other top 3 elements for this group of people?

It’s true that young people aren’t the most enthusiastic conversationalists. I’ve had good results by taking the focus away from talking and allowing other kinds of expression such as art, photography, film. Lego Serious Play is a fun and engaging method. I’ve heard of someone getting their kids to make career related TikTok videos. In these cases, we can still include those critical ingredients, but we’re allowing our students to express themselves in different ways.

Watch the replay