• Assessment of personal abilities, skills, knowledge, and interests (assisted self assessment).
  
  
• Assessment of the individual's need for support, taking into account the whole person, i.e., the complexity of the interrelations between the individual's personal situation and the potential work environment.
  
  
• Accurate information about career, education, and training opportunities.
  
  
• Information about attainable employment opportunities based on adequate labour market information.
  
  
  

The tremendous unmet need for counselling

Although proven facts and empirical evidence are rare, there is a diffuse, but strong, sense of a critical need for career and employment counselling. In this section, we summarize the disparate pieces of evidence that were brought to our attention.

The following statistics convey a sense of the magnitude of the potential client population:

• nearly 3.3 million students attend secondary schools;
• over 0.5 million are in the college system;
• enrollment in universities is approaching 1 million;
• over 1.5 million Canadians are unemployed; in 1992, more than 2.5 million filed an initial regular claim for UI benefits; in 1992-93, counsellors in CECs conducted 463,000 interviews with 239,000 clients (these data seem to indicate that fewer than 10% of UI claimants receive counselling);
• in March 1993, close to 3 million Canadians received social assistance;
• more than 400,000 underemployed individuals (in involuntary part-time work, in job-sharing schemes for economic reasons, discouraged workers) need direction to establish themselves more firmly and productively in the labour market.