The roles of guidance counselors include assisting clients with behavior or attitude changes, goal achievement, crisis coping, and counseling in areas like career choices, relationships, abuse, and mental health issues. Their functions as defined by law are to help clients develop their potentials, plan their futures and careers, and administer counseling services. Competencies include properly guiding students toward productive careers through informed choices and collaboration with stakeholders.
The roles of guidance counselors include assisting clients with behavior or attitude changes, goal achievement, crisis coping, and counseling in areas like career choices, relationships, abuse, and mental health issues. Their functions as defined by law are to help clients develop their potentials, plan their futures and careers, and administer counseling services. Competencies include properly guiding students toward productive careers through informed choices and collaboration with stakeholders.
The roles of guidance counselors include assisting clients with behavior or attitude changes, goal achievement, crisis coping, and counseling in areas like career choices, relationships, abuse, and mental health issues. Their functions as defined by law are to help clients develop their potentials, plan their futures and careers, and administer counseling services. Competencies include properly guiding students toward productive careers through informed choices and collaboration with stakeholders.
Counseling is a process and a relationship between the clients and
counselor. The role of the counselor is to assist the person or persons (clients) in realizing a change in behavior or attitude, to assist them to seek achievement of goals, assist them to find help, and in some cases, the role of counselors includes the teaching of social skills, effective communication, spiritual guidance,decision making, and career choices. A counselor's roles may sometimes include aiding one in coping with a crisis. In some settings, counseling includes premarital and marital counseling, grief and loss,domestic violence and other types of abuse, special counseling situations like terminal illness as well as counseling of emotionally and mentally distrubed individuals. FUNCTIONS OF GUIDANCE COUNSELORS The Philippine Republic Act No. 9258(Sec.2-3) defines a guidance counselor as a natural person who has been professionally registered and licensed by a legitimate state entity and by virtue of specialized training to perform the funtions of guidance and counseling. The guidance counselor's functions include the use of an integrated approach to develop a well-functioning individual primarily through: 1.) Helping a client develop potentials to the fullest; 2.) Helping a client plan to utilize his or her potentials to the fullest; 3.) Helping a client plan his or her future in accordance with his or her abilities, interest, and needs. 4.) Sharing and applying knowledge related to counseling such as counseling theories,tools and techniques; and 5.) Administering a wide range of human development sevices. COMPETENCIES OF GUIDANCE COUNSELORS Guidance counselors have the ability to administer and maintain career guidance and counseling programs. They are capable of properly guiding the students toward becoming productive and contributing individuals through informed career choices with reference to appropriate bureaus, relevant stakeholders, and national programs, and in light of the available opportunities in the community, the country, and globally. Guidance counselors are capable career advocates. They can conduct career advocacy activities for seconadry-level students of the schools in employment sites. They can collaborate various government agencies, student organizations, industry associations, guidance and counselling associations, professional associations, and other relevant stakeholders to foster student understanding and appreciation of the world of work and to prepare better and aspire for it. Guidance counselors can facilitate conduct of career advocacy in collaboration with career advocates and peer facilitators. The career advocates are not necessarily registered and licensed guidance counselors but they provide direct guidance on career and employment guidance. OTHER COMPETENCIES THAT APPLY TO THE BROADER COUNSELLING WORK There are many competencies that apply to almost all kinds of counseling contexts but not uniformly. Different authors have thematized them differently. Egan (2002) calls them the three-stage theory of counseling and marks out three broad competencies for a counselor that includes: Stage 1: What's going on? This involves helping clients to clarify the key issues calling for change.
Stage 2: What solutions make sense for me? This
involves helping clients determine outcomes.
Stage 3: What do I have to do to get what I
need or want? This involves helping clients develop strategies for accomplishing goals. Many other writers also use a three-stage model that looks at this working relationship as having a beginning, middle, and end (Culley & Bond 2004: Smith 2008). Alistair Ross (2003) provides a similar model: starting out, moving on, and letting go. Culley & Bond (2004) have described all these as foundation skills. They have grouped these foundation skills around three headings:
1.) Attending and Listening. Attending and
listening skills refer to active listening, which mens listening with purpose and responding in such a way that clients are aware that they have both been heard and understood. 2.)Reflective Skills. These are concerned with the other persons frame of reference. Reflective skills capture what the clients is saying and place it back to them but in the counselors own words. 3.) Probing Skills. This skills facilitate going deeper, asking more directed or leading questions ( leading in the sense that they move the conversation in a particular direction). Probing tends to increase the helper's control over both and content, and as a result, should be used sparingly and with care, particularly in the early stages of counselling. Elsewhere and across applied social science disciplines, there are four common skills that require studying the curriculum of accumulated scientific knowledge across disciplines, which are skills for communicating, motivating, problem solving, and resolving conflicts. 1.) Communication skills. These includes the ability to actively listen, demonstrate understanding, ask appropriate questions, and provide information as needed. Active listening involves listening to the words, the gestures and other body language. Effective communication means message you want to communicate is received as you intended to be received. 2.) Motivational skills. These skills are the ones that influence a helpee to take action after the helping session or consultation. 3.) Problem-solving skills. These include differentiating between symptoms and the problem, pinpointing probable causes and triggers for the problem, and then generating a range of possible solutions to the actual problem. 4.) Conflict resolution skills. These involve learning about styles of conflict resolution. It includes recognizing the signs of it and learning the process of conflict resolution. AREAS OF SPECIALIZATION WHERE COUNSELORS WORK Counselors are practically found in all spheres of human development transitions, and caregiving. Peterson and Nesenholz (1987) identified 11 major areas: 1.) Child development and counseling.As area of specialization includes parent education, preschool counseling, early childhood education, elementary school counseling, child counseling in mental agencies, and counseling with battered and abused children and their families. 2.) Adolescent development and counseling. As area of specialization covers middle and high school counseling, psychological education, career development specialist,adolescent counseling in mental health agencies, youth work in a resedential facility, and youth probacion officer. 3.) Gerontology( the aged). As area of specialization is considered te fastest growing field and essentially involves counseling of older citizens. 4.) Marital relatonship counsseling. Includes prmarital counseling, marriage counseling, family counseling, sex education, sexual dysfunction counseling ad divorce mediation. 5.) Health. offers possibility for nutrition counseling, exercise and health education, nurse- counselor, rehabilitation counseling, stress management counsseling, holistic health counseling, anorexia or bulimia counseling, and genetic counseling. 6.) Career/Lifestyle. includes guidance on choices and decision-making pertaining to career or lifestyle. 7.) College and University. College student counseling, student activities, student personnel work, resedential hall or dormitory counselor, and counselor educator. 8.) Drugs. has several options such as substance abuse counseling, alcohol counseling, drug counseling, stop smoking program manager, and crisis intervention counseling. 9. ) Consultation. covers agency and corporate consulting, organizational development director, industrial psychologyspecialist, and training manager. 10.) Business and Industry. Include training and development personnel, quality work-life or quality circles manager,employee assistance programs manager, employeecareer development officer, affirmative action, or equal opportunity specialist. 11.) Other specialties. include phobia counseling, agoraphobia, self-management, intra-personal management, and grief counseling. CAREER OPPORTUNITIES FOR COUNSELORS Career opportunities for counselors cover corporate environment in human resources departments, school student services departments, academe, NGOs, court, detentions prison setting, as well as in a wide range of human development service providers. They can work as individual professionals or as members of a team or as employees in agencies and departments that deal with people. Educational and school counselors. They offer personal, educational,social, and academic counseling services.
Vocational and career counselors. These
professionals facilitate career decision-making. They aid individuals or groups in determining jobs that are best suited to their needs, skills, and interests. Marriage and family counselors. These professionals offer a wide range of services fr couples and families.
Addictions and behavioral counselors. These
professionals work with people suffering from addictions.
Mental health counselors. These professionals work
with peple suffering from mental or psychological distress such as anxiety, phobias, depression, grief, esteem issues, trauma,substance abuse, and related Rehabilitation counselors. These professionals are engaged with individuals suffering from physical or emotional disabilities. Rehabilitation counselors provide services such as evaluation ogf the strengths and limitations of clients.
Genetics counselors. These professionals operate
in a very specialized context of dealing with genetic information for individuals and the decisions that come with it. RIGHTS, RESPONSIBILITIES, AND ACCOUNTABILITIES OF COUNSELORS As state registered and licensed professionals,counselors are protected. They are governed by scientific theories, practices, and processes as well as professional standards and ethics. They are responsible for the practice of their profession in accordance with their mandates and professional guidelines and ethics. They are accountable to their clients, the professional body, and the government. CODE OF ETHICS OF COUNSELORS As in all professional practices in applied social sciences, counselors must observe confidentiality at all times. Without confidentiality, clients cannot trust the counselors and therefore make the profession impossible to practice. One of the oldest professional organizations in guidance and counseling is the Institute of Guidance Counselors, established in 1968,and now a professional body representing over 1,200 practitioners in secondary schools, colleges, adults guidance services, and private practice and in other settings. Its preamble provides that guidance counselors work with clients. They come as individuals and in groups. They must work in ways that promote clients' control over their own lives. The values include an assertion that the work of the guidance counselor involves a special relationship of trust. That trust is safeguarded and promoted by setting and monitoring appropriate boundaries in the relationship, and making this action explicit to the client and relevant others. The Institute of Guidance Counselors' Code consists of four overall ethical principles that subsume a number of specific ethical standards:
PRINCIPLE 1: Respect for the rights and dignity
of the client Guidance counselors honor and promote the fundamental rights, moral and cultural values, dignity, and worth of clients. PRINCIPLE 2: Competence Guidance counselors maintain and update their professional skills. They recognize the limits of their expertise, engage in self-care, and seek support and supervision to maintain the standard of their work. PRINCIPLE 3: Responsibility Guidance counselors are aware of their professional responsibility to act in a trustworthy, reputable, and acountable manner toward clients. PRINCIPLE 4: Integrity Guidance counselors seek to promote integrity in their practice. They represent themselves accurately and treat others with honesty, straightforwardness, and fairness. Many other similar codes exist with the same expectations for ethical conduct. The fundamental principles include the following: * Respecting human rights and dignity * Respect for the client's right to be self- governing * A commitment to promoting the client's well- being * Fostering responsible caring * Fair treatment of all clients and the provision of adequate services * Equal opportunity to clients availing counseling services * Ensuring the integrity of practitioner-client relationship * Fostering the practitioner's self-knowledge and care for self * Enhancing the quality of professional knowledge and its application * Responsibility to the society The Code of Ethics goes into specifics to detail professional behavior from respect for fundamental rights, moral and cultural values, dignity and worth of clients to respect for rights to privacy, confidentiality, self-determination and autonomy, consistent with the law, and ensuring that the client understands and consents to whatever professional action they propose.