Services

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Career & Life Design Counseling (file pdf)

Education and supervision

We believe that career counselors and practitioners should have in-depth knowledge and competencies relevant for implementing and carrying out accurate actions and assessing their efficacy. All this requires targeted training activities, such as those we have tried to carry out.
These training activities aimed at increasing professional abilities required for:

• analyzing core dimensions for high quality school and work choices;
• implementing and carrying out training programs aimed at reducing the impacts of both proximal and distal, environmental and psychological inhibiting factors in clients;
• strengthening career counselors' self-efficacy beliefs about their capability of implementing meaningful interventions aimed to reduce difficulties experienced by their clients (Nota and Soresi, 2007; Soresi, Nota and Lent, 2004).

Career counselors and practitioners we have in mind, besides having a specific post master degree course and certified competencies, should testify in their activities to adhere to a specific ethical code. For us, these professionals should first of all avoid, as much as possible:

• to confine themselves to decode and process, with a diagnostic approach, their clients' experiences;
• to formulate for them hypotheses and predictions;
• to suggest and plan their choices and paths;
• to encourage a tendency to apathy, proxy and externality.

Finally, reminding some paragraphs of the Ethical Code of the SIO, career counselors while practicing their job should clearly show that:

• they respect the dignity, privacy, self-determination and independence of their clients;
• they respect clients' opinions and beliefs and don't make discriminations based on religion, ethnicity, nationality, social class, socio-economic status, gender, sexual choices and disabilities;
• they intervene only upon clients' requests or upon their representatives' requests and, in this last case, with their consent. When problems do not concern vocational guidance, they should avoid to deal with them and suggest clients to search for a solution from other experts;
• they keep an adequate level of qualification and updating; they use only instruments for which they had just obtained an expertise and, when needed, authorization;
• they preserve their independence in choosing techniques and instruments and consider themselves responsible for their use and for their results;
• they allow clients consulting their curriculum, which they will keep updated;
• when expectations and interests of the client and of the customers of the vocational guidance interventions do not match, they commit themselves to first of all protect client's interests.

The educational activities are offered to:
- psychologists
- teachers
- workers in vocational guidance
- agencies and institutions involved in vocational guidance
interested in becoming experts in "good vocational guidance practices".