• All counsellors cited understaffing as the major reason for client overload.
• On one hand, "labour market information" and "career/occupational information" were among the main areas in which counsellors, wherever they serve, would like to receive training. On the other hand, "career decision-making" ranked first or second in their mandate, and among the main counselling-related problems that clients bring to counsellors. This situation raises doubts about the adequacy of the service in terms of quality. It gives an image of career and employment counsellors ill-prepared for their essential tasks.
  
  

In Ready For Change, Career Counselling in the 90s (September 1992), the Canadian Guidance and Counselling Foundation provides some indication of the present situation:

• services "tend to be scattered and fragmented, partly because career counselling services are provided in an estimated 30,000 points of service by 100,000 counsellors."
  
  
• "Career counselling is provided by a wide variety of community agencies, most of which are specialized in areas of counselling other than career and employment counselling and are ill-equipped to provide this particular service."
  
  
• "Current career counselling frequently does not include accurate and adequate information on the labour market... not only do a limited number of service providers give any form of labour market information, the information is of questionable accuracy."
  
  
• "The networks within the career counselling community are not well developed; they are selective, informal and underutilized."
  
  

Several of the CLMPC task forces addressed the counselling issue:

• Counselling services "are often not provided to Canadians who need them and those services that are available are frequently not geared to the special needs of the target groups who have been identified as most prone to long-term unemployment."