The only question that matters first
Career counselling in India ranges from genuinely excellent to admissions brokerage wearing a lanyard, and you usually cannot tell them apart from the conversation.
So ask directly: do you receive any payment, commission or referral fee from colleges or institutes? A straight answer is a good sign in itself. Someone paid by you has an interest in your child ending up somewhere suitable. Someone paid per admission has an interest in your child ending up somewhere.
What good counselling actually does
It widens the menu. A good counsellor knows roads a family has never heard of and will put three unfamiliar ones on the table.
It asks the questions nobody at home is asking — including the uncomfortable one about what the student thinks their parents want, which is often the real decision being made.
And it separates what the student wants from what the family fears, which is difficult to do from inside the family.
What it should not do is produce a confident answer from a test. A person who tells a fifteen-year-old with certainty what they should become is selling certainty, and certainty is not available.
What you can do without paying anyone
Read the roads. All of them, once. That is the single highest-value step and it is free.
Take the free aptitude test NCERT runs for Classes 9 and 10 — Tamanna — through your school, and treat the result as a prompt rather than a diagnosis.
Talk to three people doing work your child is curious about, and ask what their day is like rather than what they earn. Most people are glad to be asked.
Visit a polytechnic or an ITI in person if those roads are in play. Ten minutes of seeing one corrects years of assumption.
Warning signs
A guarantee. Nobody can guarantee a seat, a score or an outcome, and an offer to do so means either an arrangement with a college or a fiction.
Pressure to decide inside the meeting. Any advice worth taking survives a week of thinking about it.
A shortlist that is all expensive private colleges, with no government option and no diploma or trade route mentioned. That pattern tells you who is paying.
An unwillingness to say how they are paid. You asked a simple question; a complicated answer is an answer.
A test result presented as a diagnosis — "your child is suited to X" — rather than as one input among several.
And the quietest sign: a counsellor who does most of the talking. The useful ones spend the first session asking.
When paying is genuinely worth it
When the family is deadlocked and needs someone outside it. When the student has a specific complication — a disability that affects course eligibility, an unusual combination of interests, a family situation that constrains the options. Or when nobody in the family has been through higher education and the system itself is unfamiliar.
In those cases, pay for time from someone paid only by you, and go in with your own questions. Counselling works best as a conversation you steer, not a report you receive.