Sometimes, patriotism creeps in on me when I least expect it.
During the recent holidays, I signed up for a Public Sector Career Coaching session and was paired with some big-shot director from another ministry. Being thirsty for new experiences, I requested that we meet face to face, so that was how I met him for the first time at Old Town White Coffee.
Before we started, he confessed that being a senior director, he was scouted to undergo a career coaching course so that he might impart his experience and expertise to junior officers. This made me feel quite proud of my country. We are an interconnected country which has a lot of human resource management processes in place. All I have to do is to ask.
Prior to this meet-up, I had indicated my desire to be a career counsellor in my introductory email. I thought nothing of it, so I was quite touched when he brought up the option of Education and Career Counsellors in mainstream school. Like, he asked his contacts in the Ministry of Education so that he could come prepared for our session.
Anyway, I informed him that I had once submitted my application to be an ECG counsellor before, only to receive radio silence, so I feel stuck and don’t know how to proceed from here. He didn’t skip a beat and said that it wasn’t surprising because I have zero credentials. He then asked about the ECG framework in my current school and suggested that I get my hands involved with career guidance so that I might persuade the principal to send me for relevant courses in the future. He shared more about the career coaching course that he had undergone and suggested that if I worked my way up to the Head of Development (HOD), I would be in a good position to attend this course should I still wish to pivot.
Okay, I’m not so sure that being a HOD is my cup of tea, but his thinking that I should use my current position as a stepping stone and strategise about how to use it to get to my destination was something I had never really considered before. Call it a mindset change, if you will.
When he was emphasising the importance of credentials, he explained the concept of Current Estimated Potential (CEP) to me. I have been in the educational service for so many years and have heard it being brandished about countless times, but no one has actually clarified to me that CEP is composed of HAIR (Helicopter view, power of Analysis, Imagination and sense of Reality). I have mistakenly assumed that CEP is a Grade Point Average-like figure arbitrarily assigned to each educational officer based on his academic qualifications. I never knew that there was a whole model of thinking behind it!
It was nice to receive a wake-up call and enlightenment from a fellow Singaporean.
