DOI: 10.36347/sjahss.2019.v07i04.004

Pages: 278-283

The choice of a career is very important because it affects one’s entire life. To enable students make this crucial decision, career guidance is offered in secondary schools in Kenya to help the students realise their potential and select training programmes that will lead them to appropriate careers in future. In career guidance students are assisted to increase their levels of self-awareness to reveal their interests and potential in order to equate them to specific career requirements. Despite this effort many students try to change the training programmes they had chosen immediately after admission or after a period of study in the university, indicating a dissatisfying choice. Since self-awareness is the first step in the selection of an appropriate career this study was carried out to establish if career counsellors and students perceived it as having any influence on the choice of training programmes. The study areas were Mombasa, Meru and Kiambu counties of Kenya. The study employed a descriptive survey research design. The target population was 31,145 form four students in 394 public secondary schools. Multistage sampling procedure was used to select a sample of 395 students from 33 secondary schools. In addition 33 career counsellors were purposively sampled. A pilot study was carried out in 3 public secondary schools in Embu County. The data was collected using two questionnaires and was analysed using Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS). Descriptive statistics (mean, percentages and frequencies) and inferential statistics (Chi-square) were used in data analysis. The findings of the study were that self-awareness was perceived to be useful in influencing the students’ choice of training programmes by the career counsellors and students. The study recommended that career guidance be empowered in secondary schools to increase the students level of self-awareness as well has enable them to relate the subjects, training programmes and careers.