As we go more and more towards globalization every day, our lives become increasingly interconnected. As our businesses increase, as our options increase, so do our problems. Some of those problems are physical but some of them are mental health problems. These are trauma, depression, and others that need the expertise of trained and skilled mental health professionals.
As we step more and more into the digital world, the jobs and businesses that existed before are going extinct and a new set of jobs and businesses are coming alive. This means that there are skills that we need to learn that didn’t exist before. For this purpose, we need highly trained and professional counselors who can assist people in living a fulfilling and productive life.
Whether we talk about mental health problems or we talk about career and vocational identity issues, these are very big problems that a lot of people have to deal with and most people don’t even know how to handle them. We need mental health professionals as well as counselors and guides who can handle such issues and help us lead prosperous and joyous lives.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the counseling field is growing at an exponential rate and there are a lot of opportunities in hospitals, schools, private and public institutes as well as in the market. It is one of the professions that is growing more rapidly than the others. People who go for the masters in counseling online can avail these opportunities as well as help out their fellow people.
Preparing for a Career in Counseling
If you want to help people find out their path or if you want to work with people who are stuck with some mental disease or disorder and need help then you have come to the right place. Here is where you can find all the options that you can go for and begin an illustrious career in counseling.
Basic counseling
The most basic type of course that you can do in counseling is the A.A. programs and certificate programs. These programs provide you with the training that you need in order to serve as an advisor or a coach. With the proper certification, you can even work with individuals in a limited sphere.
If you want to pursue counseling with another career like a paramedic or a nurse, then this is the program for you. Or if you want to work as a life coach or a career coach then you can go for the A.A. programs or the certificate courses that are available to you.
Professional Counseling Degrees
Once you are done with the certificates or the A.A. programs, you will have to go for a bachelor’s degree and after that, you have the Master’s degree and you can even go for a doctorate. The higher you go, the better opportunities you will get.
The most common degrees in counseling are in the field of social work, family and personal counseling, and addiction counseling. Also, if you want to enter into a good ministerial program and become ordained then you will have to have some level of counseling training as that is required.
This tier of degrees can help you get into life coaching, career counseling, social work, and the likes or it could help you achieve higher levels of success by becoming an administrator in some sort of healthcare institution. You can also go for a career in police as they require counseling expertise in some fields. You could also work with a specialized counselor in the field of addiction counseling.
Specialized Counseling Degrees
If you want to go even higher and grow your career options as well as your financial situation then you need to aim for the specialization degrees. Again you can go for social work or mental healthcare or you could go for clinical psychology or research psychology. You also have the option of going for a specialized psychiatry school as well as various fields like medical psychology, neurological psychology and others.
The specialized field of counseling can be divided into:
- Academic scholars in psychology and psychiatry
- Research, specialized and clinical psychiatry
- Practicing specialists who are working in specialized environments.
Conclusion
Most of the jobs in the field of counseling exist in the first two tiers: the basic counseling level and the professional counseling level. The jobs that exist in the basic counseling tier are plentiful but they don’t pay as good as you would think. You also have the opportunity for freelance work.
The professional degrees like the bachelor’s or master’s in counseling are the ones where you get financial stability as well as reliability of work. But if you don’t have a master’s degree then you will find out that you don’t have many options. You could work in a government organization as well as some NGO or you could work in a clinical environment. But if you get your master’s degree, you could go into research or take a job that rewards handsomely.
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