About Catalyst Careers
Catalyst Careers provides structured, one-to-one guidance across CAO, PLC, apprenticeship, and alternative pathways. Particular emphasis is placed on option-keeping, long-term planning, and avoiding unnecessarily narrow decisions at an early stage. Guidance is tailored to each student, recognising that there is no single “right” pathway and that progress often involves exploration and reflection over time.
Where appropriate, guidance may be supported by professionally administered psychometric assessments. These assessments are used carefully and ethically to support decision-making — not to label, categorise, or limit students. Results are always interpreted within the wider guidance conversation and considered alongside the student’s lived experience, academic context, and personal goals.
If your child is feeling unsure, overwhelmed, or stuck in their thinking about life after school — or if you’re looking for reassurance that they’re being supported by a qualified professional — Catalyst Careers provides structured, evidence-based career guidance tailored to the individual student.
Catalyst Careers is a specialist career guidance service supporting Leaving Cert students and their parents to make confident, well-informed decisions about life after school. The service is led by Dylan O’Shea, a fully qualified Guidance Counsellor with extensive experience supporting students with subject choice, career planning, and post-school pathways.
Alongside guidance work, Dylan has experience as a secondary school teacher, with an undergraduate background in science education (biology and physics). This classroom experience brings a practical understanding of the academic demands, pressures, and realities students face in the Irish secondary school system.
At the core of the guidance process is helping students develop a clear understanding of themselves — their interests, values, strengths, and preferences — and using that understanding to make realistic, informed choices. The focus is not simply on“what course to pick”, but on helping students build clarity and confidence around their options and future direction.
An important element of the guidance process at Catalyst Careers is the careful and appropriate use of psychometric assessment to support students in understanding themselves and their options more clearly.
Dylan has completed additional specialist training with the British Psychological Society and is listed on the BPS Register of Qualifications in Test Use as both a Test User for Ability and a Test User for Occupational Personality. These registrations reflect formal training and assessment in the ethical use, interpretation, and application of psychometric testing.
This level of psychometric qualification is not included as standard within initial guidance counselling training and represents an additional area of professional competence. It provides access to a range of well-established, standardised assessment tools that require specific accreditation and a clear framework for responsible use.
In practice, psychometric assessments are never used in isolation or treated as definitive answers. Instead, they form one part of a wider guidance process, supporting reflection, discussion, and deeper insight. The emphasis is always on helping students make sense of results in a way that feels relevant, meaningful, and empowering, rather than prescriptive.
For parents, this offers reassurance that any psychometric assessment used as part of guidance is delivered by a practitioner with recognised specialist training and a strong commitment to ethical, evidence-based practice.