Choosing between a career coach or a career counselor

- Hi, I'm Jeff Layton and I'm here in Lynda.com Studios with Valerie Sutton. And today we're gonna have a conversation about coaching people's careers. Thank you for joining me. - Thanks for having me Jeff. - So you're currently the Director of Career Services at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Can you tell us a little bit about that? What you do? - Yeah, so I work with a variety of students from anywhere with early career to mid career level students, and I help them make the transition to their next career. That can mean anything from career decision making to the really practical job search side of things, so resumes, cover letters, interviewing, salary negotiations. And then I also work with connecting them to employers. So we do a lot of events on campus where we bring employers on and they can talk to them. - Can you tell us a little bit about the difference between a career coach and a career counselor? - Yeah, absolutely. So when you're looking at coaching, it's about moving someone forward, it's not as reflective as counseling. So if you look at the difference, it may be just a situation where I know where I wanna go, but I'm just not sure what are the steps to get there, and that's where I would use a coach. But if you're looking at counseling, that's a bit more of a reflective practice. So it may be that you're very unhappy in your current career, but you're not quite sure why you're unhappy, and so you wanna reflect a little more on that process, and that's where I would look for a career counselor.