The Influence of Individual Career Counselling Strategy on Career Choices among Students in Secondary Schools in Homa Bay County, Kenya

The Kenya government has a policy for career guidance and counselling which is meant to help provide a robust and professional career guidance and counselling to students. The policy aims at creating adequate human resource and reducing the mismatch between career choices and demand for labour. This is the rationale behind provision of career guidance services to students in schools. Most Secondary school counsellors have adapted individual career counselling strategy to help adhere to the policy. Despite the effort made by the the guidance counsellors to manage career guidance and counselling in secondary school, many school leavers continue to display lack of awareness in kind of career that would be suitable for them after school. The objective of this study was to investigate the influence of the individual career counselling strategy used on career choice among secondary school students in Homa Bay County, Kenya. The study employed ex-post-facto research design and sampled 372 form three students. The Hollands theory of career decision guided the study. Data was collected using questionnaires. The instruments were validated by experts and reliability of .78 obtained. The analysis was by calculating percentages, correlation and regression. Results findings were that individual counselling strategy was frequently used at 47 % in terms of percentages. It was also established that individual counselling strategy had statistically significant influence on career choice with Pearson correlation coefficient (r) of 0.65, which was a strong positive relationship. The coefficient determinant (R²) obtain was 0.4225 which was meant that individual counselling strategy influenced career choice by 42.25%. It was concluded that individual counselling significantly influenced career decision among students in homabay county. This also increased the chance of a student making right decision on career choices by almost 50 percent.