Chapter III: The Selection, Preparation, and Professionalization of Guidance and Personnel Workers

Abstract

SURPRISINGLY little of the writing on guidance and personnel work in educational institutions dealt with the profession as such. Analysis of the articles in the Personnel and Guidance Journal (9) for a five-year period revealed that, of 411 general articles, 14 were concerned with "counselor training." Of the 136 articles classified as "research," only two dealt with counselor education. The present reviewers identified 17 articles in the same journal, from 1956 to 1959, as dealing with counselor education, seven of them classifiable as research.In the last three years, as in earlier periods (73), the majority of published investigations were status studies. Basic, longitudinal research on the selection, education, and subsequent effectiveness of guidance and personnel workers was not found. Research by doctoral students in the universities was frequently not published. An effort to locate such research appropriate to this chapter disclosed 16 theses written in the last three years unpublished in any form except as abstracts. Several factual reports were available only in mimeographed form. Will current shortages of guidance and personnel workers prompt a surge of better research and more publication regarding the selection, education, and professionalization of such workers? Selection of Guidance and Personnel WorkersCareful selection of counselors and other personnel workers is essential. This assertion was reiterated by professional committees (3, 4), by personnel administrators (77), and by counselor-educators (5,36,55,88,90). Most of the attention given this question was primarily concerned with acceptance of candidates for graduate study in counseling. Some studies were made of counselors in training, which threw light upon the complexity of the problem of sifting out the least competent. Little attention was given to the question of how people decided, in the first place, to seek graduate education in guidance and personnel; nothing was published during the last three years on the selective placement of persons in this field. These last two aspects of the selection process were reported as of considerable concern to counselor-educators in a survey of 30 Midwestern educational institutions (34). Survey of Selection ProceduresSantavicca (65) received information from 170 institutions, 129 of which offered graduate courses in counseling. The predominant emphasis in selection was upon academic competence, as judged by undergraduate record and as measured by tests. Teaching experience, work experience, and personal adjustment (as judged by interviews, letters from employers, rating scales, and staff judgments) were also considered by more than half of the institutions training counselors. Miller (53) surveyed 36 Midwestern universities and discovered little use of tests in selection of trainees. He asked for information regarding an approach to selection that has received increasing attention, the use of self-selection devices and techniques. The chief means of self-selection employed was the practicum, throug...