Why university counsellors are not fortune-tellers

You sit across from a parent who looks expectantly at you with their Grade 11 (Year 12) child anxiously sitting next to them. The anxiety is understandable, as discussing the child’s future is the reason you have all convened. 

On the table, there are the results of the psychometric assessments you have assigned to the student, as well as their recent academic transcripts. 

Based on the results and your mysterious counsellor magic 8 ball, the parents want you to prescribe a path for their child (fingers crossed it’s medicine or finance or engineering). 

The student has been showing interest and talent in fine arts and social sciences, to the dismay of the parents. The parents expect you to help them dissuade the student from taking this path. 

Is it your job to prescribe and predict a successful, financially well-off and hiccup-free life ahead for the student? Oftentimes, it can seem like we need to spit out the exact delineations of a student’s future, including the precise job, university and salary ranges, like a fortune-teller (or ChatGPT). 

It’s a frustrating situation to be in. Why might that be? 

Assumption: you are a fortune teller 

Like a fortune-teller, you are expected to demonstrate near-magical precision and insight, in order to determine a child’s future. Parents may also expect that you go along with their definition of success. 

Some parents may see counsellors as possessing a secret crystal ball. As we are professionals using an array of assessments as well as expert knowledge of university admissions and the labour market, we must know how to determine a student’s future, quickly and easily. In the age of AI, the efficiency of large language models that spit out ready-made answers is unlikely to help. 

In addition, parents often perceive the school as providing a type of a service (especially if the parents are paying large sums of money). Sometimes, the parents may want the counsellor to agree with them and say only positive things as part of this “service”. 

Reality: you are not a fortune-teller

Parents may like to think of us as oracles, with the power to determine students’ futures. 

Rather, we are educators and guides, not fortune-tellers. Our job is to help the students to be educated about themselves, about the options out there, and about how to achieve these options. We are here to help the students themselves make the decision – and an informed one at that. 

What we don’t do is determine or prescribe anyone’s futures. 

Changing job markets – and changing people

Psychological assessments can help students make informed decisions. They are certainly powerful tools in our inventory. However, they do not neatly predict the students’ futures. 

This actually highlights a theoretical assumption behind career-development theories. Using knowledge of an individual’s talents and preferences to predict their career is a framework called trait-and-factor theory. However, postmodern career theories have since proposed that an individual’s career does not always easily line up with their high-school assessment results, and it’s not always easy to plan. 

This is because individuals change; our aspirations and interests can deviate from what they were when we were in high school.

It is also because jobs change; many of the jobs our students will have in the future do not exist yet, and will be driven by technological innovations. 

And, finally, the environment and chance events can affect our careers in unexpected ways. Looking back on our own careers, I’m sure we can identify such unexpected meetings and stimuli that affected our jobs. 

So, while we can paint possible pictures of career trajectories and how to attain them as career counsellors, we cannot guarantee any of them. 

Parents’ prescriptions of success

Finally, our goal is to support the student’s success. Sometimes the students’ visions of success may overlap with their parents’. At other times, they won’t. Our role is not to agree with the parents, but to help our students chart their own path. 

How to handle situations where we are expected to be fortune-tellers

When parents are expecting us to be fortune-tellers, further clarification on certain aspects of our jobs as counsellors can help us reach a common understanding of what we can and cannot do. We should also aim to have a clear understanding of this before entering into conversations with parents. 

Clarify our roles 

As previously touched upon, we are not oracles, but more like guides and navigators. Having this analogy in our mind may lift the pressure off ourselves as well. 

Explain the process 

The process of self-discovery takes time. As advisers, we can make suggestions and then the students can follow up on them – they can take some assessments, try an activity, research some courses and then circle back to us. 

It’s important to define this as a long-term process, involving trial and error and many conversations – it doesn’t necessarily finish at the end of the meeting or even at the end of high school. Self-discovery is a lifelong journey, and parental and counsellor intervention is only at one time point. 

Identify the purpose of assessments

Assessment results help us inform students about their own strengths and possible career choices. They then help the students make a more informed choice. What they don’t do is spell out their futures for them like a magic 8 ball. 

Teach about the realities of a changing workforce 

Reading up on research and reports such as the World Economic Forum’s The Future of Jobs Report 2025 can help us gain a better understanding of the changing world of careers.

Parents may still be fixated on outdated perceptions of career development, such as the notion of choosing and continuing one long stable career for the rest of one’s life, and how certain jobs are geared for surefire success. 

To educate them, we can present postmodern career development theories (such as planned-happenstance theory or career chaos theory), either in our conversations or even in a more formal workshop. 

We can also highlight how skill development may be more helpful to the student than a fixed career path. Perhaps using analogies may be helpful. Career development is like a road trip, where we can map routes – but unexpected detours often lead to the best destinations. 

Discuss definitions and pathways of success

What does success mean in your society? What sway do those narratives have over how your parents approach careers? We all want our student to be successful, but having differing approaches can be a frustrating experience.

Having real case studies of a variety of versions of success – alongside relevant data – can be helpful for an enriching and expanding discussion of what it means to be successful. Stories are powerful in making a case; use ones from far away (famous people) as well as locally (alumni). 

Can you think of students who didn’t choose desirable majors or swerved from traditional pathways, or those who took detours that turned out to be necessary? 

Alongside narratives, data can also be used to make a case – for example, how salaries even out after five years for seemingly unprofitable majors. But make sure it’s relevant for the context of the student – the country where the student wants to settle or your local country – rather than drawing on a third country’s labour-market information. 

Involve the student

There are many stakeholders in the room, giving their input into a student’s success. Parents, counsellors, friends and family can chip in (and they will, if they are all caring and invested). But it’s our job to help the students to make their own informed decisions about their own life trajectory. 

However, we need to keep in mind that it should ultimately be the students who make their own decisions about their future. When we are discussing the assessment results, the case studies, possible career options and university majors and definitions of success, don’t forget to always involve the student. They will be living out their futures, not us. 
 

Credit goes to Paul Nalo for the inspiration for this article. Thank you, Paul.