• "Most unemployed persons are matched with training programs not through counselling that determines their needs and capabilities, but through the administration of preset criteria that have the effect of disqualifying large numbers of people who could potentially benefit from training programs."
  
  

It is obvious to the Task Force that a major gap remains in our understanding of the need for counselling from the client perspective.

47. We recommend that a survey of clients -- actual and potential -- be made to determine the extent and characteristics of their need for counselling and whether this need is being met in terms of both quantity and quality.
    
    
    

Variety of counselling situations

There are a number of counselling situations related to the transition process (Figure 20). Employment and career counselling is not likely to be a unique event in a lifetime, but rather a service potentially needed every time an individual is in a new situation of transition into employment. Typical situations that may be faced more than once in a career are:

• school-to-work transitions at various levels of education, with or without a diploma,
• late initial entry into the workforce,
• re-entry into the workforce after a significant interruption (e.g., women after child rearing),
• recent immigration to Canada,
• displacement after layoff or plant closure,
• underemployment (and the possibility of better employment opportunities),
• people with disabilities in transition into employment.

Because the various clienteles are quite different, these situations call for different approaches and counselling expertise. For clarity, we can distinguish two broad categories of counselling situations:

• student counselling, where the counsellor operates within an educational institution (school, college, or university) and addresses the orientation needs of a student population facing choices about education, initial career choices, or both;