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Career Guidance – An introduction to counseling

The E-Learning course «Introduction to Career Counseling – Instruments and Procedures» wants to accompany participants on their way to becoming a professional career counselor. A career counselor will have to perform a responsible and multidimensional task, working closely with many different people, their biographical situation and especially with their specific problems.

In times of information overload, individuals are overwhelmed by possibilities and have a hard time to defining clear goals or making appropriate choices for their training and their career. This situation burdens and stresses many people, and this is where a professional career counselor can help.

Professional career counseling supports and enables social and economic success of individuals as well as societies at large by showing ways to acquire appropriate qualifications and to find sustainable and proactive occupational options in different stages of life.

Target audience & course content

This course is designed for practitioners who prepare themselves for career guidance and its institutionalization or for those intending to perfect their expertise – for example teachers or directors of vocational or general education schools, counsellors of employment agencies, or experts in governmental institutions.

Module 1 introduces the theoretical basis of counseling and explains how  and why it is necessary in different contexts, e.g. for individuals seeking professional advice, but also for staff members or for partners of different institutions which are cooperating.

Modules 2 and 3 generally focus on the role of a counselor as the facilitator of biographical transitions. These can occur at various stages of life such as School → Vocational training or Vocational training → employment.

Module 4 introduces ways to optimize career counseling within institutions, i.e. Process and Organizational Improvement and the last module 5 (Cooperation with Social Partners), focusses on the social context in which career counseling takes place. Due to the fact that career counseling must occurs in a large network of institutions, economies and societies, career counselors need to have specific professional abilities in order to act effectively and successfully within a given context.


The table of content is available here:

Module 1: «Basics of Counseling»

  • Lesson 1: Job Description of a Counselor
  • Lesson 2: Communication
  • Lesson 3: The «Setting» of Counseling Situations
  • Lesson 4: The Phases of a Counseling Session
  • Lesson 5: Interview Techniques

Module 2: «Initial Vocational Career Counseling»

  • Lesson 6: What is Initial Career Counseling?
  • Lesson 7: Five Steps
  • Lesson 8: Career Information
  • Lesson 9: Career Guidance Methods

Module 3: «Job-Oriented Competence Assessment»

  • Lesson 10: Life Story = Learning Story
  • Lesson 11: Competence Assessment
  • Lesson 12: Job Placement
  • Lesson 13: Skill-Development Programs

Module 4: «The Institutional Level»

  • Lesson 14: Labour Market Policy Goals
  • Lesson 15: Tasks, Processes & Organizational Structures
  • Lesson 16: Segmentation of Clients into Groups

Module 5: «The Interdisciplinary Level»

  • Lesson 17: The Social Dialogue
  • Lesson 18: Cooperation Partners
  • Lesson 19: Designing Collaboration