Figure 4. The employment systems of the employment counsellor.

ECs living and working in rural and northern regions were the research participants for this major project. The research strives to clearly understand how counsellors accomplish their jobs, despite many barriers. To understand the roles and responsibilities of ECs, the literature review examined expected standards and employment systems within which the counsellor works. This research project looked at the labour-market information available to these workers, as they try to service the needs of their clients.

The topic of counselling is broad and encompasses many different perspectives. One of the first areas of inquiry was the actual process or task of helping an individual find employment. The literature called this process a transition and explained that the transition difficulty relates directly to an individual’s relative capability to work. The Canadian Labour Force Development Board’s (1994) Task Force on Transition into Employment described job finding as:

Transition into employment is a process. Its success depends on a complex set of factors, including characteristics of the labour market as well as those of individuals. The concept of employability captures what is at stake in the transition process. The Task Force defines employability as: the relative capacity of an individual to achieve meaningful employment, given the interaction between personal characteristics and the labour market. (p. viii)