Counselors' Emerging Role in Individual and Canadian Economic Success.

Professional organizations in the world of work view counselors as human resource development professionals with historic and defined roles. The issue of new and emerging roles for counselors is the result of the need for a shift from counseling only for vocational placement to a concern for the intangibles resulting from the interaction between organizational change and evolving worker needs. It has been suggested that professional issues associated with this change will be focused around aspects of the economic and occupational environments with which counselors will interact and in which their clients will be emersed. Major departures in education and counseling need to occur to facilitate economic development. Curriculum and counseling need to be distributed over a wider temporal span which extends into post-formal school arenas and later lifetime periods of individuals. The counseling effort should embrace not only specific client needs, but be broad enough to consider organizational, societal, and economic realities. Counselors formally involved in economic development strategies may assume some combination of roles. The counselor will need to acquire additional knowledge and skills to support these new and more complex roles. Meeting these challenges will contribute to individual and national ecomonic development. (ABL)