Advice worker : Career development

For many advice workers, career development often involves moving away from actually providing advice, at least for part of the time. Promotion is often linked with taking on additional or different responsibilities, such as:

• recruiting and managing volunteers;
• training new staff;
• management of the advice centre;
• promoting the services of the advice centre;
• income generation and financial management.

Although there are opportunities to move into advice centre management, in general, advice work offers relatively few numbers of management positions. Some advice centres are cooperatively run, with no hierarchical job structure.

Advice workers who enjoy client work may choose to develop their careers by taking a course in counselling. Others may choose to gain expertise in a specialised area of advice work, such as housing, debt and finance, or drug and alcohol-related problems. Others still choose to pursue opportunities and professional or academic training in a profession related to advice work such as law.