9 Steps for a Successful Career in Counseling

(Photo : 9 Steps for a Successful Career in Counseling)

While counseling is a significantly rewarding career path, a lot of professional rewards can also come from knowing you are getting the best out of your chosen career. That is why, if you aspire of becoming a counselor, it is always good to know how you can reach the top of your profession and put your time and energy to good use to reap success. 

Why Choose Counseling?

Any role within a counseling career will see you giving back to the community, providing an important service, and making a positive difference in the lives of others. For example, you could be supporting better mental health, helping people to overcome addiction, or positively take control of their lives as a whole. 

Counseling is not only a fulfilling career option for those who want to help others, but it is also one with long-term development potential and job security if you make all the right decisions. 

So, what are the key steps to gaining a successful career in counseling?

Step 1: Improve Your Personal Skills

There are many skills which a good counselor will need, alongside official qualifications and experience. These skills pertain to your personality and your values as an individual. Therefore, looking to improve these skills will be fundamental if you want a rewarding counseling career and looking to connect with the people you work with and support in the best possible way. 

Here are just some of the personal skills you should look to explore and develop. It is important to do so as a good starting point before pursuing your relevant career, as these skills will need to be in place in the first instance to get you off on the right foot and give you a higher chance of success strongly.

• People skills. There is no doubt that this is a key skill for a counselor to have, as people will be at the heart of everything you do. If you feel as though your people skills are lacking and you don't spend enough time around others, developing this skill is a must. This is also important because counsellors can expect to work with a variety of demanding and vulnerable people, depending on the role you choose. Therefore, having a solid foundation with people skills is a must. 

• Compassion skills. Counselors need to be compassionate towards the people they are supporting. You may be a naturally compassionate person, or maybe you are looking to learn how to develop your compassion and learn how to take extra compassionate steps. While compassion and kindness are traits that fundamentally come naturally, there are ways to understand how to communicate compassion better and develop those skills. 

• Organizational skills. This applies to both the learning process of becoming a counselor and actually working as one. You will need to be extremely organized with your studies and if you are looking to learn with online school counseling programs, other counseling programs, or at a physical institution. You will also need to have exceptional organizational and time-management skills when working in this field to make sure you can manage your appointments, clients, and further responsibilities adequately. 

• Communication skills. Counselors need to communicate effectively, both with speech, listening skills and with their body language. Clients who speak with you seeking guidance, support, or professional advice during the most vulnerable times of their lives will need to fully understand what you are communicating to ensure there is no confusion or uncertainty, which could increase levels of stress. As a counselor, you need to be able to communicate clearly, confidently, and calmly. 

• Being open-minded. For many people, a counselor is a safe person in a safe space, especially for those dealing with sensitive issues. Being respectful is key, but also is being open-minded and non-judgmental. As a professional counselor, it is your role to provide the best guidance tailored for the individual without making any judgment or letting any subjectivity get in the way of your work. 

• Patience skills. When it comes to counseling, you cannot control the actions or behaviors of the individuals you speak with. There may be times when you deal with highly demanding and stressful patients. Having patience is an absolute must for a successful counselor. You will need to learn how to keep your own emotions in check, stay calm, and maintain your patience with others, even in the most demanding circumstances. It may even be that you interact with angry or distressed patients daily during your sessions, or maybe patients who are not acting on the guidance you are giving them. No matter how they are choosing to act, maintaining your own patience is an absolute must for counselors. 

Step 2: Spend Time Around People

The more you integrate yourself with other people, the more you will feel confident being around them, learn more about them and improve your people skills. It can be a great help to attend a physical learning institution for your counseling qualification to be around like-minded people and a wide variety of people on a university campus. 

Alternatively, online learning with online school counseling programs or other online programs can still enable you to interact with a wide variety of other students and people using video chat, forums, and messaging services. Online counseling learning like online school counseling programs also does not mean that you cannot arrange study groups or meet-ups.

Alongside the educational side of things, take the time to seek out more opportunities to be around people in general and gain confidence in interacting with others. 

Step 3: Decide How You Best Learn

To become a counselor, you will need to take the relevant steps with a counseling qualification or degree. It is therefore important to understand how you best learn and the type of learning environment you would thrive within. You can choose online school counseling programs if you know that you learn better online, or even if you are looking for the next step, like a masters degree while you are already working. Or you can seek out counseling qualifications at a brick-and-mortar institution. 

Knowing how you best learn is key, as it will impact the ease in which you learn, and maximizing the potential of your learning experience overall, so thinking carefully about online school counseling programs or physical counseling programs is important. 

Step 4: Enroll with Your Chosen Qualification

Whether you choose online school counseling programs or a physical institution, you then need to enroll at the right time for you and your career plans. Do your research and speak with the relevant contacts to understand where you would like to enroll and how to do so, so that you can kickstart your new career in counseling. 

Step 5: Work and Study Hard

A successful career in counseling is going to take a dedicated work ethic and lots of studies. You need to be prepared to work and study hard if you want a rewarding career and to gain a qualification you can be proud of. The hard work does not stop after gaining your qualification from online school counseling programs or physical programs, either; you then need to work hard to find your suited counseling role and develop your skills in the workplace. 

If you're looking to launch your own business in managing your own counseling clients, this will take extra hard work and planning to build your business from scratch and start developing your expertise to draw in clients. 

Step 6: Research All the Various Counseling Roles Available

There are many great counseling roles out there, and it is important to think about which one you would feel most passionate about. This all depends on what kind of environment you would like to work in, the issues you would like to deal with, and the type of people you would like to help. Perhaps you want a more general role helping lots of different people on a counseling consultancy basis, or maybe you have a specific role in mind, such as addiction recovery, grief counseling, or school counseling. 

It is a good idea to research this before enrolling in online school counseling programs or other programs because you can then make sure you pick the right qualification. If wanting to work specifically as a school counselor, online school counseling programs are the right choice.

Step 7: Try to Gain Work Experience

If you have the opportunity to gain work experience in a certain environment before committing to a particular counseling role, this can be a very beneficial idea. This does not have to directly relate to counseling, either, as it can be a good opportunity to merely give you a taster of what it is like to work in a certain environment. 

For example, if you are considering online school counseling programs, you may want to gain work experience working within a school to see what it is like having students around you every day. Likewise, if you are considering a counseling role in a clinic or hospital, work experience in this environment will help you better understand what it is like to work within that atmosphere every day. 

This will be helpful for better understanding how you would deal with the demands of certain environments and how comfortable you would feel in certain environments, so that you can make an educated choice when it comes to the next step of your counseling qualifications or career. 

Step 8: Seek to Continue Developing

A successful counseling career should not see you ever looking to stop learning or developing. Whether it is personal development and research in your spare time or on a professional level, such as seeking out extra qualifications, developing yourself continually will help to see your career thrive. It may be that you realize certain areas you would like to develop as your career moves along: perhaps there are gaps in your knowledge you feel could be worked upon, or maybe new clients or colleagues give you a new interest or something you would like to learn about how you handle your work or the people around you. 

Further development could also mean taking the next step in your qualification, like gaining a masters degree at a certain point in your career. 

Step 9: Be Reliable in All You Do 

Effective counselors should be dependable at all times. You cannot hope to have a successful counseling career if you are constantly changing appointment times, having bad time management, or losing track of where you are up to with particular patients or the people you deal with. Counselors should be relied upon in everything they do and constructively manage their time and workload. 

No matter the environment you're working in as a counselor, whether it's a private office, rehabilitation clinic, a school, or a hospital, reliability is an absolute must so that you can be a pillar of trust for the people who require your guidance and services. 

In Summary: Your Successful Counseling Career

A successful counseling career is therefore not only dependent on your professional prowess; it is also dependent on developing yourself as a compassionate and reliable person. The great thing about a career in counseling is that it allows you to combine all the best attributes from your personal and professional life: as a caring, compassionate, and patient person, you can work to build a career centered on that which puts others at the forefront of everything you do. 

A successful counseling career takes the relevant qualifications, career development, and hard work that you can expect with any rewarding career option, but seeing it pay off in the end and working to help others will make all that hard work seem worthwhile. 

Take the time to get to know yourself, the people you want to work with and help, the type of counseling role that would best appeal to you, and the type of working environment you know you would thrive in. Only by exploring these ideas can you make the best choice for you.