The article analyzes the current status of student counselling in vocational education institutions, contextualizes findings on this problem and discloses contradictory points of counselling. It is justified that vocational education institutions normally view professional career counselling as the processes of dealing with and solving students' internal conflicts within professional self-determination. Career centres are positioned to be the implementers of the ideas of student career counselling. However, such research methods as theoretical analysis, comparison, pedagogical observations and logical generalization made it possible to specify some typical problematic aspects of career counselling within professional development of the modern personality, which are mostly reduced to the inconsistencies of the ideal and real images of the chosen career, subjective perception and ignoring of value orientations in relation to professional success and career growth in a market environment, irrelevant self-assessment of individual and personal qualities, etc. The authors of the research suggest some promising ways of solving the problematic aspects of student counselling in vocational education institutions, which are conceptualized in the mechanisms of a productive innovative interaction between scholars from the Institute for Vocational Education of the National Academy of Pedagogical Sciences (NAPS) of Ukraine and the teaching staff and are implemented in the framework of introducing the system of professional career counselling in vocational education.