A foundational handbook for aspiring and early-career counsellors in India, built on one principle that runs through every chapter: the decision always remains the client's.

Career counselling in India sits at a crossroads. Commercial platforms hand out confident-sounding reports. Training programmes teach useful craft but rarely check it against evidence. This book is written for the counsellor caught in the middle — someone who wants to help students and families make real decisions, without pretending any assessment can make that decision for them.

Across nine chapters, this book gives you four practical frameworks used in every session, five running case studies, seventeen worksheets, an independently checked review of what psychometric assessment can and cannot tell you, and a full account of India's actual policy landscape: NEP 2020, the DPDP Act, and the real, still-forming rules around who can call themselves a career counsellor.

This is the first book in The Practising Career Counsellor series.