When career counselling examines women's lifestyle issues, the message women receive is positive. They are asked to consider: Do you expect to have children? When do you want to do this? Have you thought about how you will handle life style changes which will occur? We discuss anticipated changes and look at ways other women have handled those changes. Personal needs and values are explored in an effort to paint a picture of an ideal lifestyle.

Regardless of the exact questions, an interest in lifestyle and childbearing concerns is crucial to supporting women at career cross- roads. The approach implies that career development for women is different than for men; it is unique and has its own considerations that must be addressed. If the differences are acknowledged, career counseling can help women to find answers to difficult questions rather than reacting defensively.

In my own practice and in my personal life, I have found that women with children seek career paths where they can balance family life with paid work. The kind of balance they are seeking varies with the age and needs of their children and their own personal need to seek challenges outside the family sphere.

The clients who need the most help in the lifestyle area are: women who are thinking about having children, women pregnant with a first child and worried about their careers, and re-entry women who, after having shifted away from the work place are wanting to shift the balance back towards paid work.

Women often talk about such situations in extreme terms, such as taking leaves of absence, staying at home to raise a family, reentering the labor force after having been "out." Increasingly, I am seeing among women of childbearing age, a trend to "balancing," or the subtle shifting of priorities as their families expand, children grow, people's needs change. Counseling with an eye to the subtle changes in women's life style helps them to see their choices more creatively. It also helps them to understand that the desire for balance is not the same as being ambivalent about working for pay.

Career Counselling Uses Skills Assessment to Build Self-Esteem and Develop a Feeling of Competence

Doing a skill assessment with a client offers the individual a very positive experience, because most people discover that they have many more talents than they originally recognized. When they see what skills they have acquired, they feel better about themselves and more confident about their ability to perform work for pay. How does a skill assessment manage to produce such an effect? Skills assessment re-defines how people become competent.

All the assessments I do with women begin by reviewing past life experiences, looking at four important areas of a person's life: paid work, unpaid work, leisure, and training. Initially, we examine the various activities in order to assess just what skills were being learned or utilized.

For women who have made significant contributions in voluntary capacities while opting out of the paid workforce, this exercise has a big impact: they learn that skills can be acquired in a variety of situations; paid work is only one arena for skill development. Women who are under-employed, unhappily employed, or temporarily employed in unsatisfying work realize that some important skills acquisition is most likely taking place in one of the other areas of their lives.

When women are asked to reflect on the variety of places they may have acquired skills, the myth that skills are competencies acquired only on the job is destroyed. It is replaced by a powerful attitude that can help women succeed: people develop competencies in many different ways, and those competencies can be brought to paid jobs.

Skills assessment defines a skill as an ability rather than some kind of technical expertise. Women frequently approach a skill assessment with the belief that they have no skills. Usually what they mean is that they have no "marketable skills," or more specifically, that they don't have the set of technical skills (or body of knowledge) that is required to perform a particular job.