How To Become A School Counsellor

Who is a school counsellor?

A professional school counsellor is a person who is certified and trained who addresses the needs and various problems of the students through various counselling programs. A school counsellor works with all the students including those who are considered to be “at-risk”.

These counsellors are specialist in human behaviour and relationships and provide assistance to students through 3 primary interventions: individual counselling, consultation, and coordination.

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What is the prerequisite to becoming a counsellor?

It’ important that you know how this field works before getting into it. For that, the best way to get a sense of what professional counsellors do is to talk to professionals and spend some time out in the field with them.

There are various fields in which a counsellor can take up a specialization and work such as:

  • Mental Health Counselling
  • Marriage and Family Counselling
  • School Counselling
  • College Counselling
  • Rehabilitation Counselling
  • Addiction Counselling
  • Pastoral or Faith-Based Counselling

Steps to becoming a counsellor

Step 1: Get your Bachelor’s degree

The first step to becoming a school counsellor is to earn a four-year bachelor’s degree from an accredited college. It would typically take four years for it to complete. Since you are aspiring to become school counsellor it would be of an add-on advantage if you would take a degree course in teaching. You can also take this course online. But you should take it from a college which would offer the best online Teaching degrees.

Step 2: Get a Master’s degree

If you want to be school counsellor master’s degree is required in most of the cases. Becoming a school counsellor is very different and a more challenging job than most of the other counselling work. As in this, you have to work with students this requires making a comfort level with them and also to learn a number of targeted skills and methodologies that would come in handy for this degree. You would also be required to complete a course in career guidance counselling, crisis intervention and trauma counselling.

Step 3: Do an internship in your specialization

A school counsellor should interact with students, parents, teachers and other staff on a daily basis. Each day you would have to face new challenges. Thus, doing an internship in this field would help you to understand what you have to do on a daily basis and what are the challenges you would have to face in your daily work.

Step 4: Start your career or continue your education

Now at this stage, you have two options either you can start your career as a school counsellor or you can continue your education and earn a doctorate degree. 

Degree options

Typically, students attain bachelor’s degree not in counselling but in related fields, such as psychology, sociology or teaching. This gives them a knowledge and skill to apply these in their area of specialization when they take a master’s degree in counselling.


This is a course that requires great dedication, practise and skill and it would be apt that you take this degree from a good college or university and if you're doing an online course you should do this from any of the best online Psychology colleges. As this would improve the value of your course and employability chances. Thus, all the recruiters from this field would accept you to have a bare minimum experience and also a good knowledge in this field. As this is a field that requires you to sometime deal with tricky and sensitive situations with students.

Catat Komen

4 Ulasan

  1. Nak jadi counsellor kene ade kebolehan..kene pandai berkomunikasi dan berfikir. Bukan mudah, orang yang betul2 minat pasti dapat handle dengan mudah

  2. Teringat dulu. Cita-cita nak jadi kaunselor. Minat yang mendalam. Sampai pikir, kalau ada rezeki sambung belajar,nak ambik bidang ni.

  3. My brother used to be a school counselor ^^ actually sy pun minat nak jd kaunselor tapi tak kesampaian..hehe


sila tinggalkan komen anda...:)