As the number of China's college graduates hits a record 11.58 million in 2023 - an increase of 850,000 from last year - these new graduates, with confusion and anxiety about their future, are choosing to seek help from paid career counseling, Xinhua News Agency reported on Tuesday.

While trying to choose a career planner for herself, Zhang Yuan (pseudonym), a senior student from a university in Guangdong province, found that there wasn’t any unified industry standards for "career planning counseling".

"Everyone seems to be newcomers to the industry, and the prices vary greatly, from about ten yuan to tens of thousands," Zhang said.

Under the question of "Are there any reliable online career counseling services?" on Zhihu, a Quora-like Q&A and knowledge-sharing website, someone posted ”I want to do an online career planning consultation, but when I received the quote, it was about 9,000 yuan, which made me even more confused."

Can paying for counseling help one find a suitable job?

For most college students, their career counseling "sources" are "recommendations" from social media, as "big data" is able to peek into users' life.

Wang Feifei (pseudonym) happened to find such posts during last year's autumn recruitment season. At that time, she was facing the "embarrassment" of having "no response to resume submissions, frequent rejections in initial interviews and even being unable to find internships." When alone at night, she had doubts about her career choice.

After reading the headline "10 years of human resource management experience to help you clear up confusion over unemployment, as well as get a promotion and pay rise," she immediately sent a private message to the blogger, asking for help.

According to the report, career planning consultants on social media are not all psychological counselors. Their resumes more often include keywords such as "senior human resource management, artificial intelligence senior engineer, 10 years of investment banking experience," etc.

Services provided by them not only include strategic content such as career counseling and career planning, but also interview coaching and resume editing. Some career planning consultants also boast about having abundant industry resources.

Most career counseling planners on social media are reported to not rely on a specific intermediary platform as a guarantee, but rather directly accept consultations requests in their personal capacity. The prices vary according to the services provided.

A career counselor on one of the platforms provides counseling services with prices of 99 yuan, 399 yuan and 899 yuan. The 99 yuan service is for a 30-minute's "micro-counseling" experience, while 399 yuan is the normal price for a 90-minute one-on-one counseling, and 899 yuan is the price for a long-term counseling, which includes three 90-minute one-on-one counseling sessions.

There are also some career planning consultants who price their services according to content. For example, "personality exploration plus career exploration" is 499 yuan, "specially for autumn recruitment plus position matching and interview guidance" is 600 yuan, and "industry analysis, market analysis plus personal interview strategy" is 900 yuan. At the same time, their promotional content includes "career planning counseling is suitable for those who are confused, anxious, low-paid, or burdened with debt in life and want to give themselves an opportunity." They also mention that "countless numbers of our clients who switched careers have gone from a monthly salary of 3,000 yuan to a monthly salary of 8,000 yuan."

After three communications with her consultant following a Self-Directed Search (SDS) by John Holland, Wang got a job offer from a foreign company. "From the moment I received the offer, I suddenly felt that I was no longer confused," she said. The consultant and Wang discussed before and believed that Wang's personality was "more compatible with the job she was offered."