What Should You Look for in a Career Counsellor? 10 Questions to Ask Before You Book

Choosing a career counsellor for your child is almost as important as choosing the advice itself. The right counsellor helps a confused teenager understand why certain paths fit them. The wrong one can leave them more confused than before, just with a glossy report to show for it.

Career counselling is not a regulated purchase in the way, say, hiring an accountant or an electrician is. Anyone can put up a website, offer a "career test," and call themselves a career counsellor. Some are excellent. Some are well-meaning but under-qualified. And some are running little more than a personality quiz with a price tag attached.

If you're about to book an assessment for yourself or your child, here are ten questions I'd want any parent to ask, regardless of which counsellor or service they're considering.

1. What are their actual qualifications?

"Career counsellor" isn't a protected title in South Africa. Psychological and psychometric testing, however, sits within a regulated space — different categories of registration with the Health Professions Council of South Africa (HPCSA) permit different types of test use, and some instruments are restricted to psychologists or psychometrists specifically. Rather than relying on a title alone, ask which HPCSA category the practitioner is registered in, and check that registration status directly on the HPCSA's online register, it takes a couple of minutes and tells you they've completed accredited training and are bound by a professional ethics code.

2. Do they work with your age group specifically?

Guiding a Grade 9 learner choosing subjects is a different task from guiding a Grade 12 learner choosing a degree, which is again different from guiding an adult considering a career change. The questions, the tests, and the conversation all shift. Ask how much of the practitioner's work is with your specific stage, school learners, university students, or adults in transition, rather than assuming a generalist covers all three equally well.

3. Do they look beyond a single test?

A personality quiz or interest inventory can be a useful ingredient. It should never be the whole meal. Ask whether the process treats test results as one input among several, used to inform a conversation, rather than as an output that hands over a final answer. If a service promises that a test alone will "tell you your career," that's a signal to be cautious.

4. How many assessments do they use, and are they scientifically credible?

A single 15-minute online quiz cannot reliably capture aptitude, interest, personality, and values all at once, these are different psychological constructs and need different instruments to measure properly. Ask what the assessment battery actually consists of, and whether the tools are standardised and validated, ideally with a track record spanning decades, rather than a proprietary quiz built in-house with no published reliability data. A well-established, internationally recognised aptitude battery, used alongside interest and values measures, gives a far more defensible picture than any single test on its own.

A credible practitioner should also have no hesitation naming the specific tests they use. This turns "trust me" into something you can check yourself: ask for the names, then spend ten minutes searching them. Established, published assessments have a research history and a public track record. If a provider is vague about what they actually use, or the "test" doesn't turn up anywhere outside their own website, that's worth noting.

5. Do they explore the whole person?

A thorough process looks at more than test scores. It considers academic performance and subject choices, interests, abilities, personality, values, and the learner's own aspirations and how those pieces fit or conflict with each other. Ask what the session actually covers. If the answer is just "you'll do a test and get a report," the process is thinner than it should be.

6. Do they understand the local education system and real career pathways?

This matters enormously in South Africa. A counsellor needs to understand APS scores and how they're calculated, the practical differences between a diploma and a degree, what TVET colleges and learnerships actually offer, subject prerequisites for specific degrees, and how professional registration works in fields like engineering or psychology itself. Generic career advice that doesn't account for South African entry requirements and pathways can send a student chasing a course they don't qualify for, or missing a route they didn't know existed.

This one is hard to test in a single session, most practitioners will sound confident on the spot, whether or not the answer is actually accurate or current. A more reliable check is to look at what they've published before you book: do they have articles or guides on their website covering APS, TVET routes, or specific study pathways? Written material gives you time to read it properly, and it's a reasonable proxy for how deeply they actually understand the system they're advising on.

7. Do they explain the reasoning, or just hand over a list?

A list of ten career titles is not career guidance, it's a printout. Ask whether the feedback session walks through why particular fields came up: which aptitudes, interests, or values pointed there, and how they connect to specific study routes. A student who understands the reasoning can apply that same thinking to options the report never mentioned. A student who only has a list has nothing to reason with the moment their plans change.

One of the fastest ways to judge this before booking is to ask for a sample report — a de-identified example is a reasonable request. Look at what you're shown: is it a page of generic personality labels and a career list, or a document that explains reasoning and reads like it was written about a real person? A provider unwilling to show a sample at all is worth being cautious about.

8. Is the student actually part of the conversation?

It's common, understandably, for a parent to want to do most of the talking, they're often the one paying, organising, and worrying. But if a teenager sits through their own feedback session largely in silence while a parent asks the questions and receives the answers, the process has quietly stopped being about them. Ask how the session is structured, and whether the student is expected to engage directly, ask their own questions, and hear the feedback addressed to them.

9. Is there a follow-up process, or does it end with one report?

Career decisions rarely settle in a single sitting. A subject choice might need revisiting after mid-year results. A shortlist of degrees might need pressure-testing against actual APS requirements once final marks are in. Ask whether there's any provision for follow-up contact, a second conversation, or ongoing support or whether the relationship ends the moment the report is emailed through.

10. What do they consider red flags themselves?

It's worth listening for how a practitioner talks about their own field's shortcuts. Be cautious of anyone who promises a guaranteed "perfect match" career, presents results as simplistic single-word verdicts, steers a student toward specific institutions or courses they happen to have a relationship with, or effectively makes the decision for the student rather than equipping them to make it. Good career guidance builds a framework for decision-making. It doesn't hand down a verdict.

The Bottom Line

None of these questions are about catching anyone out. They're about making sure the process matches the size of the decision. A subject choice, a degree, or a career change shapes years of a person's life, it deserves a practitioner who is properly registered, uses credible instruments, looks at the whole person, understands the local pathways, and treats the student as the one in the room who matters most.

If you're currently weighing up your options, you're welcome to learn more about My Career Plan and how we approach career guidance and psychometric assessment, including how sessions are structured for different age groups, and what our sample reports look like in practice.