The fourth wave in workplace counselling: towards the understanding and the development of the professional specialisation of workplace counselling

This Project addresses the future of Workplace Counselling and concludes that there might be benefits if Workplace Counselling were to become an established Professional Specialism or “a sophisticated activity”, (Lees 2004), one with its own professional discourse and its own professional knowledge and skills-base. Investigations were undertaken to discover if such a proposal might be acceptable within the general workplace counselling community as defined by the Employee Assistance Programme Provider, (EAPs). Enquiries were also undertaken into ways that such a specialisation might be achieved and these investigations have led to the suggestions offered in this Project Report about possible ways to educate and train the putative Specialist Workplace Counselling Practitioners that developing such a proposed new professional specialism might generate. There are 2 main strands to these enquiries: Strand 1): A series of investigations into: i) The professional developmental potential for workplace counsellors; ii) The possibility that promoting workplace counselling as a new specialism might be a way forward that is acceptable to those likely to employ such practitioners, (e.g. the Employee Assistance Providers); iii) The sorts of specialist training that might be valued by the workplace counselling community; iv) New ways of modelling workplace counselling, including approaches that might sometimes place the psychological welfare of the organisation before that of the individual worker. Strand 2): An investigation into the academic requirements of Higher Education when offering specialist, postgraduate, workplace counselling training provisions. This has included an enquiry into the nature of knowledge from the perspective of the Learning Professional generally, (Gibbons et al., 1994; Scott, Brown, Lunt and Thorne, 2004), and the Workplace Counselling Specialist in particular. The importance of reflexivity and criticality, (Barnett, 1997; Eraut, 1994; Merriam, 2001; Sachs, 2000; Schon, 1987), in any disciplinary discourse are discussed and ways of inculcating these qualities into the education of workplace counsellors are considered. The conclusion reached is that the Learning Professional's discourse, although anchored in an original discipline, (in this case that of the Workplace Counsellor), is also transdisciplinary in that innovative, discipline-free, solutions may well be sought to resolve professionally unboundaried issues that will often require interdisciplinary, multiple-aspect, investigations. These enquiries are summarised in the form of two specific outcomes: a) A designed and validated Workplace Counselling Postgraduate Programme, culminating in an MSc award that will begin in October 2006. This Programme is built on an evaluation of the theoretical foundations underpinning knowledge-gain in most disciplinary discourses at postgraduate learning levels generally, which are then related and equated to similar constructs underpinning the proposed postgraduate education of the workplace counselling specialist. In this Postgraduate Programme, the student will not be trained in isolation from other disciplines but will sometimes be learning alongside students from parallel disciplines within the university's School of Social Sciences. b) Proposals for some new ways of modelling workplace counselling theory. The whole of these enquiries and the resultant discussion has been set out in a book proposal: "The Workplace Counsellor - a Professional Specialist' that is currently being considered by various publishers. The style of this book is intended to be "user friendly' in order to appeal to the interested layman whilst at the same time retaining its academic rigour so as to provide a useful textbook for the professional counsellor.

Doctorate in Psychotherapy (Professional Studies) Doctoral Project.