Cybercounselling: A Bend in the Road?

By Marc Verhoeve

Cybercounselling is quickly becoming an acceptable form of professional helping. In 1996 I first coined the term for my Internet-based column hosted on the website of the Ontario School Counsellors Association. I played around with terms such as web-counselling and e-counselling, but chose cybercounselling because it most accurately reflected this new professional vehicle. Three years later, this new dimension of counselling has passed from its infancy into adolescence.

At this year’s American Counseling Association Conference, my presentation, “Career Counseling in Cyberspace”, attracted over ninety delegates. My subsequent discussions with delegates, both at the conference and by email, confirmed that career practitioners and university professors are intrigued with this new paradigm. Upon invitation from the ACA, I am now creating a number of articles for their web-based virtual bookshelf, entitled “Cybercounseling and Education in the New Millennium”; these will be hosted on the ERIC website.

One major concern with cybercounselling is the issue of ethics and confidentiality. This concern is shared by the American Medical Association and the American Psychological Association. Using their templates, the National Board of Certified Counselors [NBCC] has adopted a protocol of practice-standards.

Career practitioners are also concerned with the viability of cybercounselling as an actual niche in our profession. Many believe it cannot replace traditional face-to-face (F2F) counselling because the counsellor cannot use visual feedback and body language to support the interaction — this was the same argument presented about thirty years ago when phone-based crisis counselling was first implemented!

Time has proven that hot-line counselling is a very specialized and effective vehicle for helping clients in crisis; web-based counselling is a natural technological progression of this vehicle. Accessibility is further increased with the web, as the counsellor and the client can interact regardless of the global location or time zone of either person. An added benefit of e-mail-based, asynchronous communication is that it allows both partners to seriously consider the other’s comments before responding.

As we move to live-chat and e-conferencing with live-video, we shall dispel many of the arguments that F2F counselling cannot be replicated on the web. When this dimension of cybercounselling becomes commonplace, it will truly provide the counselling practitioner a global practice!

If this article sound like futuristic visioning, allow me to present some of my experiences with the present-day reality of the web:

• The web is becoming the benchmark-source of career information. As the Head of a secondary-school counselling department, I have witnessed a transition in the marketing of post-secondary publications. Two years ago, we received two dozen course calendars from a university; now we receive 3 copies and are told to use their website. I have also been invited by university liaison personnel to speak at their conference in August about the effective use of the web for information-dissemination and marketing.
• Every 54 days, the amount of content on the web doubles! Our future web-clients are becoming more computer-literate; the term, MP3 [live-digitized music on the web], has passed the word “sex” as the most common search-word on the web.
• In my role with the management team at our school board’s Guidance & Career Education website, I monitor the site’s hitmeter [access-log]. When this site was launched in March, 1998, we received 10,000 hits. In May, 1999, this increased to 140,000 hits [52% were sourced from outside our Board from 30 countries]!
• America’s Job Bank has links to nearly 900,000 jobs. CareerPath (now Career Builder) offers more than 300,000 listings every week.
• As a member of the original design-team of the Conestoga College’s Career Development Practitioner Program, I was part of the delegation that convinced the universities of Waterloo, Wilfrid Laurier and Guelph to articulate with the college program, thereby allowing this certificate to be part of their degree programs. This consortium approached The Counselling Foundation of Canada for funding to “dot-com” the program [provide web-based courses]. With their funding, we are presently able to offer 70% of the program through internet-delivery.
• As a webcourse architect, I designed the Formal Career Instruments course for the Conestoga program. It has been my ongoing vision that Conestoga’s C.P. program’s web-instruction will not only make the course more accessible, but it will also train a new wave of career practitioners who will be adept at cybercounselling, as their skills in “on-screen articulation” will be honed through their web-based research, assignments, and discussions on the class bulletin-board.
• As a cybertraining consultant for RPP/Sigma, a test-publisher, I respond to interpretation and application enquiries about career-assessment instruments from career practitioners and psychologists throughout Canada and the USA. An increasing number of counselling professionals are using the web as a primary or accessory service-vehicle. To obtain a better vision of the service-protocols of this vehicle, I invite you to visit www.metanoia.org; as you surf this site, it is apparent that it is our responsibility as a profession to be literate about this vehicle and to maintain a professional, ethical framework for its service-delivery.
• I am presently collaborating with Dr. Doug Jackson on the design of the web-based version of the JVIS, the Jackson Vocational Interest Survey, a popular Canadian career assessment tool. JVIS.com is the first web-based standardized career assessment instrument. Cybercounsellors hoping to create effective web-based practices will require professional toolkits that are available in the same medium. Cyberspatial resources must include more than career-informationa websites; JVIS.com is the first of a series of these new “virtual tools”.

As is apparent from the number of “professional hats” that I have chosen to don, I believe strongly in this new paradigm for the career practitioner. Certainly, it will not replace traditional F2F counselling; however, it will provide a powerful accessory to the present model. In my part-time career-transition practice, some clients prefer a blend of service-vehicles. The first session may be F2F, and subsequent interactions, email-based. But there will also be an increasing prevalence of total cybercounselling-practice with a global clientele. As our client-population becomes more internet-literate with other dimensions of their lifestyle [such as the dramatic growth in e-commerce], there will be an expectation that we as a profession also use this as a service-vehicle. For some of us it will be one of our tools; for others, it will be an exciting new professional niche!

Cybercounselling is not a curiosity… it is an exciting new paradigm for the career practitioner. My office PC’s mousepad contains my fundamental professional philosophy:

“A bend in the road is not the end of the road…unless you fail to make the turn.”

Marc Verhoeve, Cybercounsellor

My Contactpoints are:

marc_verhoeve@ad.wrdsd.edu.on.ca
mverhoeve@rpp.on.ca
verhoeve@sympatico.ca

In addition to being a secondary-school counselling head, Marc Verhoeve is a webjournalist, cybertraining consultant, webcourse architect, presenter at conferences in Canada and the U.S., as well as having a part-time private practice for adults in career transition.