Amber Hughes, Ph.D, NCC
Dr. Hughes is a National Certified Counselor. She graduated from the University of Tennessee with a Ph.D. in Counselor Education and Supervision. She earned her M.Ed. in School Counseling from Vanderbilt University.
Hello! Welcome to my web site. I have spent a lot of time working as a career counselor and researching and studying career counseling. Because of this, I have developed (and am constantly developing) my own approach to career counseling.
I wanted a space to share information with students who take my career planning courses and with professionals who practice career counseling.
Let me give you some background about myself...
I have worked as a school counselor, an academic advisor, and a career counselor. Now, I teach career planning, do career research, and teach counselors to do career counseling.
In my work with career counseling, I started off using a lot of what we call traditional career assessments. These are assessments that many people have taken; they tend to be interest inventories that give you a list of careers that best fit with your interests. What I found in my work, though, is that all too often these interest inventories did not help. Sometimes, people were frustrated with the results. Other times, the results were right on, but they did not address the real career issue the individual was facing. This experience led me to explore more constructivist approaches to career counseling that use qualitative career assessments.
I have also come to recognize and value the impact that family has on our career. Strangely enough, most career theories do not consider how these people affect our decisions. But they do! I know that for myself, my family is usually the biggest part of my decisions. So I have also made a point to acknowledge and include family and culture into the conversation when I do career counseling.
You can read more about my approach to career counseling here.