A very prominently asked question on informational forums such as Quora is how to make money as a career counselor. The question is so popular, it’s possible you have been interested in finding the answer yourself. As it turns out the demand for career counselors is significant these days. After all, most individuals are looking for some guidance and assistance in choosing a career for themselves.
This makes the job of career counselors vital since it takes a level of intuition, intelligence, and maturity to choose the right career path for people to put them in a position they will enjoy. After all, their livelihood is riding on it. As a career counselor, your job is to make a choice easier for them to settle on. But how exactly does a career counselor make money with their skill set? Let’s take a look at 15 effective ways that you can make thousands as a career counselor.
How to Make Money As A Career Counselor
1. Organizing And Hosting Seminars
Hosting career seminars is one of the best ways that career counselors make money. The idea is to set up a networking hub with fellow professionals and have them share knowledge so that each can learn something new and be enriched further in their field. Suppose you are the one organizing such seminars in your community or local area regularly. In that case, word will begin to spread and you will be able to have more paying attendees come to these gatherings.
To sell tickets you would need a draw, so renting out somewhere that has meeting rooms and inviting hired counselors to come in will get interested to rise. You can even sell books at the seminar to make additional money. The more people show up, the more money you make. Even if you earned $100 for every attendee, you can still make a good profit with an event with over 50 people.
2. Life Coaching
In every professional setting, there will be cases of those who are not as fortunate as others willing to get assistance from those with higher earnings, as well as seasoned professionals who are simply burnt out. Whatever the reasons, people need a place where they can turn to others who can help to lead them out of their low-paying or highly stressful jobs into something more suited to their particular talents.
To help them, they can turn to a life or career coach to help them seek such a change. As a life coach, you will need to help get people who may have fallen into financial hardships or an unfulfilling rut back on track, by helping them either find a career they love or develop a more satisfactory lifestyle while getting paid for your assistance.
3. Setting Up Career Fairs For College Students
Some people get a particular satisfaction out of helping younger people, such as students or recent grads, find their way in the career world. This can be a very gratifying and exciting money-making opportunity for a career counselor. A career counselor can guide high school students to avoid bad jobs and steer them towards good ones.
Many even organize career fairs where they invite multiple potential employers and provide a way to meet students, setting up possible connections for a prospective employee and employer pairing, for a small fee.
This can even be a type of rapid-fire interview process, which can result in on-the-spot job offers for those students who match up well with certain job opportunities or internships. All one needs to do to set this up is to just book a room at a local university or college, promote it as a career fair, and they can be well on your way to helping students find their future careers.
4. Career Advice Blogs
Not everyone interested in career counseling is willing to offer it as a service, but they can still reach a wide target market by offering their knowledge and expertise through a website and a blog. Job seekers are always scouring the internet, seeking career advice or career counseling, and you can make money through such visitors if they come to your site.
Because there are so many career listings and job boards, prospective employees might find seeking them out overwhelming. Your blog or website can help clarify many topics by expanding on some of the most common questions asked. To get an idea of topics that people want to know about, you can seek out the most commonly asked questions on Quora about job-related or career topics, and blog about those, monetizing your content.
To start a successful Career advice blog you need a hosting (Bluehost), a domain name (Name.Com), also you have to target some low competition keywords (Long Tail Pro) , a great theme (Elegantthemes), collect clients emails (Aweber).
5. Get A Position As A School Career Advisor
Typically, those seeking career counseling services are those who are the nearest to starting their career path, or in other words, college students on the brink of graduation. To help them or recent grads find their workplace and career niche, they turn to school counselors and university advisors. In such a position you can work with these students closely to help them find the confidence and develop the skill sets they will need upon entering their choice of career in the workforce.
In doing so, you will play a pivotal role in helping them the best choices about their continuing education and careers, helping to set them up for employment success. You can apply to offer your services to the school as a permanent position, or a temporary one, or even seek out employment with a private company that offers career counseling services to schools as part of their business model.
6. Career And Job Hunting Workshops For Different Age Groups
One of the biggest hurdles people face in searching for a career is that they simply don’t know where to go learn about them. This presents an opening in the market to make money in career counseling by giving workshops to people of different age groups. These informational sessions would allow people, who will pay an affordable fee to attend, to learn various important aspects of job hunting and getting started in a career.
These workshops can be provided as a service on an individual basis to students getting ready to enter the marketplace, as well as to organizations in a formal workshop format. The covered topics at these sessions can range from resume and cover letter writing to establishing networking skills, performing mock interviews, and so on.
7. Career Group Facilitation
Working as a career group facilitator is one of the best ways to remain on top of your field. With this position, you can provide small-scale career counseling on a one-on-one basis. There is a lot of variance in these positions since they can deal with a host of different types of people such as teachers, students, and even employees at a company who are in different age groups and at various points in their professional lives.
If you choose to work with a group in this manner, you can engage with both large and small groups. It is essentially bringing together a community aspect where various aspects are focused on the development of careers. If you are certified in your field of work, you can leverage your accreditation and expertise to charge more for facilitating these types of encounters.
8. Resume And Cover Letter Writing Services
You can increase your earning potential as a career counselor by offering services that assist people in writing resumes and cover letters. Everyone needs a resume (and most need cover letters) to apply for employment, but many don’t have the knowledge needed in how to write them, structure them, etc. Therefore, they are looking for someone trustworthy and informed to help them out. You can help these people by teaching them how to write or how to improve putting together their resumes so that they can land a job faster.
Your clients may be looking for a particular position and they need their resume individually tailored to highlight their qualifications, relevant experience, and strengths to stand a better chance of securing their desired position. As you would be the expert in the job market, you can charge them in assisting which such services.
9. Working With Outplacement Services
The unfortunate truth is that some companies simply cannot keep on all of their staff for a variety of reasons. However, some of them don’t want to cast people out without anywhere to go so they try to help the individuals being laid off to find a new position as soon as possible to not dramatically affect their livelihood.
As a member of an outplacement firm, you can get paid very well for services that include establishing contact with various business leaders and working with individuals who are soon to be unemployed in helping them update their resumes and prepare for interviews, as well as other aspects involved in a job search to help them secure a position at a new place of employment quickly.
10. Self-Employed Consulting Services
A great option for a career counselor is to work as a self-employed consultant who specializes in helping to pay clients figure out their career goals and assist them in charting a map for a successful and fulfilling form of employment. As your own boss, you can be an independent contractor who sells services to interested clients for as much as $75 to $150 per hour.
You can also market your expertise to organizations that require assistance in matters relating to their staff’s future or alternate careers. The key is that the marketing of your services falls on you because without you taking the action, no one else will do it for you. You have to get your name out there and you can do so through job boards, personal connections, and a variety of other promotional mediums.
11. Selling Professional Development Programs To Business Professionals
Not only is advising business professionals one of the fastest-growing occupations out there, but it also pays handsomely. You can make an excellent living by selling personal development programs to business professionals that are tailored to the particular client. By offering to sell a customized program suitable per need basis, you can charge for saving busy people time by providing a relevant, manageable development level system.
12. Short-Term Project Consultation
As a career counselor, your average salary will vary based on an array of factors including your skills, experience, and the client’s company size. If you get your foot in the door with a recognized client, you can collect a higher salary as they are generally willing and able to pay more for your services.
You can do so by offering your consulting services for short-term projects. These can typically pay out $500 to $1,500 by companies looking for counseling professionals to generate insights into better recruiting, training, and employee retention practices. While these projects will not pay as much as a full-time service, it does make for great part-time work with reliable pay and flexible hours.
13. YouTube Career Advice Channel
Starting a YouTube channel that provides valuable career advice is a great way to monetize your career counseling skills. By displaying your willingness to share your acquired knowledge with the world, you can get a healthy YouTube following. You might be contacted by various parties with specific questions they may have, and you can use those as ideas to generate more relevant and targeted video content about that topic of interest.
You should also make content about topics that are the most commonly searched, as those will have the highest possible attention drawn. Once you achieve 1,000 subscribers and generate 4,000 monthly viewing hours, you will be given the ability to join the YouTube partnership program, and start to monetize your efforts.
To start a successful YouTube career advice channel, you need some tools that will help you reach more viewers to convert them to new subscribers and potential customers. TubeBuddy and Vidiq are the best to do so.
14. Become An Event Speaker
One of the best ways to make money as a career counselor is by speaking at events. Companies are always setting up a slew of seminars, workshops, conferences, and webinars to address interesting topics. If you have fresh, valuable insight to offer the attendees, you will likely secure future speaking gigs like this at other events. Your reputation for delivering great content will continue to yield more speaking opportunities, all of which will boost your earning potential for such engagements.
The Harvard Business Review recently broke down the earning potential for event speakers of various tenures:
- New speakers: $500 – $2,500 per appearance.
- Relative novices, perhaps looking to promote their first book: $5,000 – $10,000.
- Established speakers with several books to their name serving as “social proof”: $10,000 to $20,000.
15. Publish A Career Choosing Assistance Book
This option is always available to help you monetize your career counseling experience on top of any of the aforementioned options. For instance, you can publish a book ranking the top career of the 21st century, which lays out how to best choose the one that suits a particular type of person.
People can be overwhelmed by the exploration of potential careers, and with busy lives, most don’t have the time to dedicate to vetting each one thoroughly or to consider the best schools that will help them get to where they would like to be.
Your book can cut through a lot of the noise by laying out the conclusions of your research, offering insight through your personal experience. As someone who gets published, you inherit an automatic sense of agency, or in other words, your readers trust that you have the experience to help guide them in finding their ideal job.
Final Thoughts
With a career counseling career, you can serve as an invaluable assistant to those who are looking to make important career decisions, by offering them counsel, experience-evidenced advice, patience, empathy, an open ear, and sincerity. Your earning potential depends on your approach, but you are by no means limited to one.
Those new to this sphere can start with a blog, paired with a resume and cover letter writing assistance services. You can also organize college career fairs to give students exposure to what is out there. As your experience grows, you will need to do research and potentially publish books. Once they start to sell, you will likely garner a social media following, which serves as social proof of your authority on the career counseling topic.
As your experience gets more prominent, you can begin to seek out life coaching opportunities, short-term project consultation gigs, career seminars and workshop hosting, and partnerships with outplacement firms.
If you are still interested in making more money from side hustles, then we suggest to you to check our next article of: How To Make Money As An Interior Designer (30 Profitable Ideas)
Frequently asked questions:
What can a career counselor earn?
How much you earn as a career counselor depends largely on your level of experience, but an average salary is about $25.61 per hour, which translates to just under $53,300 per year.
Are career coaching certification courses available for free?
Yes, there are various free courses available such as the Oxford Home Study Centre.
I’m Thomas, founder of Genie Dollars, a platform sharing proven strategies for making money online. With experience in affiliate marketing, print-on-demand, and freelance writing, I aim to inspire and guide others toward financial freedom through online entrepreneurship.
