Tips to get the most from counselling placements
by Mervin Straughan
August 2024
As well as benefiting from excellent supervision, I had two supportive placement leads who were outstanding and helped make my 100-plus hour programme memorable.
However, the process of finding and completing a placement can be daunting for trainee therapists. For our class, it became challenging on account of communication issues and unforeseen and unfortunate circumstances at our place of study. These issues set dominoes falling on our expectations and timescales. Some students felt blindfolded as they set out to find a placement provider. Given that our hours were to be completed in less than one academic year, the pressure was on.
Several trawls of the internet yielded little advice.
Counselling courses will differ in their delivery and focus but for those with a placement component, these general pointers might be helpful. They are gained from my own experiences and gleaned from fellow therapists:
Seeking a placement
1. Start looking for a placement as soon as practicably possible and according to the timeframes outlined by your college, university, or training centre. My first was found using a google search. Although the deadline to apply had passed by a couple of days, the organisation told me a late application would be considered. Mandatory training began in September, and I saw my first client in the November.
In the new year, I calculated the need for a second placement which came a month later when a classmate put my name forward. Six weeks later, I was seeing my first client with this organisation.
2. If your place of study has a placement team, work with it to seek out possibilities and to understand roles and responsibilities as well as what needs to be done and by when. For instance, providers might need to be approved to ensure they meet the student's professional learning requirements and have appropriate health and safety and other policies in place. Agreement forms will need to be signed and submitted.
Interviews
3. Placement providers use interviews to learn more about you so make the most of this opportunity to sell yourself.
Client hours
4. Placement providers often take students from a range of academic institutions with different timescales for completing their placement hours. Explain your timescale to ensure your needs can be met or to confirm if a second placement will be required.
5. Check if your counselling placement organisation has any holidays when you won’t be seeing clients – for instance, if it's a college or university where students are your clients, it might have blocks of weeks between terms or at half term when they return home.
6. If Monday is your placement day, consider the number of annual and one-off bank holidays here in the UK and how many potential client hours might be affected. During the 2023/24 calendar, both Christmas Day and New Year’s Day were also Mondays.
If you’re likely to miss out on client hours through bank holidays, discuss the matter with your placement lead to see if it’s possible and practicable to make alternative arrangements. In some cases, I rescheduled client appointments to the Tuesdays of the affected weeks.
Placement paperwork
7. Ensure all your paperwork is completed accurately and promptly, keep your placement team up to date, and alert it early to any changes in circumstances.
Monitoring progress
8. Set up a spreadsheet with potential client hours, key milestones, training, meetings with your placement lead, and any internal and external supervision.
9. Factor in the possibility of 'no-shows.'
10. It's likely you'll be required to complete a client hours log provided by your exam board. Be sure to complete this as you go along as it will save a lot of work in the end. Expect the exam board to be specific about how to complete the log, for instance, when it comes to the basics of writing dates, frequency of supervision and so on.
Familiarity with room, procedures, processes, and systems
11. Check your room long before seeing your first client so that you know how the heating and lighting controls work, are happy with the furniture layout and so you can confirm what IT equipment is available and identify what you might need to bring. If there’s a room booking system, familiarise yourself with it.
12. Ensure you know how the organisation's client management systems work (training is usually provided) and input what the organisation requires after each session in a timely manner.
13. When you have your first client hours under your belt, you’ll be reasonably familiar with how your client diary is working and how much flexibility there is for changing or increasing client hours.
14. Plan appropriate breaks between sessions to be fully available for each client, to allow enough time for inputting information to systems, and to avoid overload and burn-out.
Training formal and ad hoc
15. Make the most of all training opportunities. As well as mandatory training, some placement providers organise learning days. One of my placement providers held a conference for its counsellors exploring creativity in counselling. The knowledge sharing and the networking opportunities that event offered were fantastic.
16. And look out for the ad hoc learning opportunities that each water-cooler or kitchen tea-making interaction can produce. My interactions with other counsellors enabled me to learn about their experiences, chosen modalities, and counselling journeys to date. At the time, I was focused on person-centred counselling because of my studies and was fascinated when they discussed their approaches which included, to name a few, cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT), gestalt, and rational emotive behaviour therapy (REBT).
17. Factor in the amount of mandatory training to be completed before you see your first client. It can take a couple of months though I was aware of one provider in the region that insisted on six months before client work got under way.
Key people
18. Develop a great working relationship with your placement lead and raise any concerns as early as possible. Some organisations also provide an internal supervisor, who along with your external supervisor, will be instrumental in your professional growth.
Supervision
19. Find a supervisor well in advance of starting your placement. A session or two before will help you understand how supervision works. It's worth the extra cost. Incidentally, our supervisors had to be on the approved list of our study centre.
You'll learn so much from a good supervisor. They check that you're working within the ethical framework and support you through feedback as well as insights from their own experiences.
The BACP (British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy) is explicit about the number of hours of supervision per client hours for trainees.
Placement assignment and evidence
20. If you have an assignment devoted to placement work, plan for it. With a reasonable number of client hours completed, start to consider if any will make appropriate case studies. My placement assignment ran to a weighty 16,500 words so I was pleased to have already done some of the groundwork.
As mentioned earlier, completing the hours log while going along, also saved a lot of last-minute work.
And finally
It's a given that securing our placement hours is important. However, the client must be at the heart of everything. Many clients come to counselling in a vulnerable state. They are placing immense trust in us. We must be there for them regardless of the requirements that this learning journey has of us.