Career in counselling advice.

[Imtoooldforallthis]

Hi my daughter is considering a career in counselling and has asked me for help trying to find the right course. She is a single mum, not very academic, but extremely caring and genuinely interested in people. She work so will have to study in her limited time off. Has anyone done this and can advise what courses are acreddited and recognised.

Look at the BACP website - I'm afraid it's a fairly long slog to become a fully trained and accredited counsellor, my friend is studying a BACP course part-time and it's taken him 6 years and it's really hard work, not just attending the course and doing assignments, you also have to commit to work placements, being counselled yourself and supervisions and so on, might be quite challenging as a single mother - it's also not an absolute given that she'll easily find well paid work as a counsellor once qualified, my friend's interest is in working with children and young people so looking at working in schools and so on, not too many jobs there unfortunately! Maybe different if she's interested in a different type of counselling. Of course there's always private practice but it can obviously take a while to build a sufficient client base to earn enough to live off.

Would she be interested in other types of roles within the mental health area or is she set on counselling? I wonder where she might be interested in support worker in the community type roles, or maybe a healthcare support worker for a mental health trust? Or how about care home work for dementia sufferers? Or you can now become a mental health nurse through an apprenticeship route? A lot of these would have the benefit of working in the area alongside training or gaining qualifications which would presumably be preferable to having to study alongside unrelated full time work?

Thank you for your reply, I will pass this info on to her.

Hi, yes I am retraining as a psychotherapist/counsellor. My background is in Social Care/Youth Offending.

The process for me will be:

Level 3 at a local college as an entry to a masters (1 year part time) - self funded.

Masters degree (2 years full time or 3 years part time) with an accredited BACP university. Funded via masters loan.

So a total of 4 years part time. It isn't a quick fix. My plan is to make up work with evening private clients, and potentially source a part time role as 'steady' money. Unless I can find a good full time role that fits with a young family.

She needs to think about how she will do this course. Has she done her own research on it?

Routes into counselling are getting more uniform in an attempt to show some sort of regulation of the service. Most people will now have to do higher education as a route into counselling and psychotherapy.

She will also be expected to work academically as part of her assignments, and to manage a placement also with observations.

I have a young toddler but a partner to support, I know it will be incredibly intense and don't plan to have more children until I am qualified/close to qualifying. No way I can do assignments with a tiny baby.

Would she consider becoming a careers adviser/careers counsellor? There are different levels of training available up to masters level and there is a huge skills shortage so lots of jobs at the moment many of which are term time and school hours.