Development of Model Professional Standards for Counselor Credentialing

摘要

A project to establish model professional standards and procedures for credentialing counselors in the alcoholism and drug abuse field is described. The certification concept followed in this project was based on five key principles. They were: (1) The standards must apply to the full range of counseling settings and counselor entry routes into the profession; (2) The standards and assessment techniques must be competency based; (3) The focus needs to be on whether the appropriate knowledges and skills exist and not on how those competencies were acquired; (4) Standards and assessment techniques must be developed collaboratively with various alcoholism and drug abuse counseling and treatment constituencies; and (5) The standards and recommendations on assessment techniques must conform to the equal employment opportunity regulations. The certification concept implies the existence of a core set of tasks that every certified counselor must be able to perform. The first stage in developing professional standards was identifying these job tasks. The second stage was to identify the knowledges and skills essential to competent performance of each job task. The final stage was to identify techniques for assessing the competencies required. Plans for implementing a national credentialing system were discussed.