Placement Officer

ESSENTIAL DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES

The requirements listed below are representative of the knowledge, skill, and/or ability required. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions. Essential duties and responsibilities include, and are not strictly limited to, the following:

• Facilitates professional development and employment search support with a demonstrated understanding of employer needs and expectations, generally, and as they relate to specific industries.
• Maintains accurate and confidential student records.
• Works closely and regularly with students to identify interests, skills, needs, employment barriers, and available resources, and responds to all student questions or requests regarding placement support.
• Coordinates mock employment interviews with every program graduate.
• Works closely with departments to maintain and report students’ employment progress, and provides timely tracking of graduate placements, including the generation of monthly placement reports.
• Provides timely follow-up with students, graduates, and/or employers and potential employers to obtain placement outcomes, and exhibits persistence in attempts to contact graduates for current employment information (via telephone, e-mail or other communication methods.)
• Coordinates with program directors to plan externship site visits, as necessary.
• Attends program advisory board meetings.
• Evaluates, researches, and updates training, employment, and labor market materials utilized by the department.
• Networks, establishes, and maintains relationships with area business representatives to obtain job leads and facilitate employment opportunities for students and graduates.
• Refers students to prospective employers for employment opportunities, and maintains documentation of student referrals.
• Coordinates with departments on professional development instruction and content delivery as needed.
• Performs reference and background checks on students as needed.
• Actively demonstrates Manchester Bidwell Corporation core values.
• Participates in the development, delivery, and promotion of services offered by the corporation.
• Follows establish procedures and guidelines.
• Other duties as assigned.

Counseling in different school levels

Elementary school counseling

Elementary school counselors provide academic, career, college access, and personal and social competencies and planning to all students, and individual and group counseling for some students and their families to meet the developmental needs of young children K-6. Transitions from pre-school to elementary school and from elementary school to middle school are an important focus for elementary school counselors. Increased emphasis is placed on accountability for closing achievement and opportunity gaps at the elementary level as more school counseling programs move to evidence-based work with data and specific results.
School counseling programs that deliver specific competencies to all students help to close achievement and opportunity gaps. To facilitate individual and group school counseling interventions, school counselors use developmental, cognitive-behavioral, person-centered (Rogerian) listening and influencing skills, systemic, family, multicultural, narrative, and play therapy theories and techniques, released a research study showing the effectiveness of elementary school counseling programs in Washington state.

Middle school counseling

Middle school counselors provide school counseling curriculum lessons on academic, career, college access, and personal and social competencies, advising and academic/career/college access planning to all students and individual and group counseling for some students and their families to meet the needs of older children/early adolescents in grades 7 and 8.
Middle School College Access curricula have been developed by The College Board to assist students and their families well before reaching high school. To facilitate the school counseling process, school counselors use theories and techniques including developmental, cognitive-behavioral, person-centered (Rogerian) listening and influencing skills, sytemic, family, multicultural, narrative, and play therapy. Transitional issues to ensure successful transitions to high school are a key area including career exploration and assessment with seventh and eighth grade students. Sink, Akos, Turnbull, & Mvududu released a study in 2008 confirming the effectiveness of middle school comprehensive school counseling programs in Washington state.

 High school counseling

High school counselors provide academic, career, college access, and personal and social competencies with developmental classroom lessons and planning to all students, and individual and group counseling for some students and their families to meet the developmental needs of adolescents. Emphasis is on college access counseling at the early high school level as more school counseling programs move to evidence-based work with data and specific results that show how school counseling programs help to close achievement and opportunity gaps ensuring all students have access to school counseling programs and early college access activities. High School College Access curricula have been developed by The College Board to assist this process.
Transitional issues to ensure successful transitions to college, other post-secondary educational options, and careers are a key area. The high school counselor helps students and their families prepare for post-secondary education including college and careers (e.g. college, careers) by engaging students and their families in accessing and evaluating accurate information on what the National Office for School Counselor Advocacy calls the 8 essential elements of college and career counseling: (1) College Aspirations, (2) Academic Planning for Career and College Readiness, (3) Enrichment and Extracurricular Engagement, (4) College and Career Exploration and Selection Processes, (5) College and Career Assessments, (6) College Affordability Planning, (7) College and Career Admission Processes, and (8) Transition from High School Graduation to College Enrollment. Some students turn to private college admissions advisors but there is no research evidence that private college admissions advisors have any effectiveness in assisting students attain selective college admissions.
Lapan, Gysbers & Sun showed correlational evidence of the effectiveness of fully implemented school counseling programs on high school students' academic success. Carey et al.'s 2008 study showed specific best practices from high school counselors raising college-going rates within a strong college-going environment in multiple USA-based high schools with large numbers of students of non dominant cultural identities.

School counselor roles, school counseling program framework and ethics

Professional school counselors ideally implement a school counseling program that promotes and enhances student achievement. A framework for appropriate and inappropriate school counselor responsibilities and roles is outlined in the ASCA National Model. School counselors, in most USA states, usually have a Master's degree in school counseling from a Counselor Education graduate program. In Canada, they must be licensed teachers with additional school counseling training and focus on academic, career, and personal/social issues. China requires at least three years of college experience. In Japan, school counselors were added in the mid-1990s, part-time, primarily focused on behavioral issues. In Taiwan, they are often teachers with recent legislation requiring school counseling licensure focused on individual and group counseling for academic, career, and personal issues. In Korea, school counselors are mandated in middle and high schools.

School counselors are employed in elementary, middle, and high schools, and in district supervisory settings and in counselor education faculty positions (usually with an earned Ph.D. in Counselor Education in the USA or related graduate doctorates abroad), and post-secondary settings doing academic, career, college readiness, and personal/social counseling, consultation, and program coordination. Their work includes a focus on developmental stages of student growth, including the needs, tasks, and student interests related to those stages(Schmidt 2003).
Professional school counselors meet the needs of student in three basic domains: academic development, career development, and personal/social development (Dahir & Campbell, 1997; ASCA, 2005) with an increased emphasis on college access. Knowledge, understanding and skill in these domains are developed through classroom instruction, appraisal, consultation, counseling, coordination, and collaboration. For example, in appraisal, school counselors may use a variety of personality and career assessment methods (such as the or (based on the) to help students explore career and college needs and interests.
School counselor interventions include individual and group counseling for some students. For example, if a student's behavior is interfering with his or her achievement, the school counselor may observe that student in a class, provide consultation to teachers and other stakeholders to develop (with the student) a plan to address the behavioral issue(s), and then collaborate to implement and evaluate the plan. They also provide consultation services to family members such as college access, career development, parenting skills, study skills, child and adolescent development, and help with school-home transitions.
School counselor interventions for all students include annual academic/career/college access planning K-12 and leading classroom developmental lessons on academic, career/college, and personal/social topics. The topics of character education, diversity and multiculturalism (Portman, 2009), and school safety are important areas of focus for school counselors. Often school counselors will coordinate outside groups that wish to help with student needs such as academics, or coordinate a program that teaches about child abuse or drugs, through on-stage drama (Schmidt, 2003).
School counselor interventions for all students include annual academic/career/college access planning K-12 and leading classroom developmental lessons on academic, career/college, and personal/social topics. The topics of character education, diversity and multiculturalism (Portman, 2009), and school safety are important areas of focus for school counselors. Often school counselors will coordinate outside groups that wish to help with student needs such as academics, or coordinate a program that teaches about child abuse or drugs, through on-stage drama (Schmidt, 2003).
School counselors develop, implement, and evaluate school counseling programs that deliver academic, career, college access, and personal/social competencies to all students in their schools. For example, the ASCA National Model includes the following four main areas:

• Foundation - a written school counseling program mission statement, a beliefs and philosophy statement, and a focus on the ASCA standards and competencies and how they are implemented for every student;
• Delivery System - how lessons and individual and group counseling are delivered;
• Management System (use of calendars, time, building leader-school counselor role agreements, creation of action plans); and
• Accountability System - use of a School Counseling program audit, results reports, and school counselor performance evaluations based on 13 key competencies.

The model is implemented using key skills from the Education Trust's Transforming School Counseling Initiative: Advocacy, Leadership, Teaming and Collaboration, and Systemic Change.

School counselor

A school counselor is a counselor and an educator who works in elementary, middle, and high schools to provide academic, career, college access, and personal/social competencies to K-12 students. The interventions used include developmental school counseling curriculum lessons and annual planning for every student, and group and individual counseling.
Older, dated terms for the profession were "guidance counselor" or "educational counselor" but "school counselor" is preferred due to professional school counselors' advocating for every child's academic, career, and personal/social success in every elementary, middle, and high school (ASCA, 2005). In the Americas, Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Pacific, the terms school counselor, school guidance counselor, and guidance teacher are also used with the traditional emphasis career development. Countries vary in how a school counseling program and school counseling program services are provided based on economics (funding for schools and school counseling programs), social capital (independent versus public schools), and School Counselor certification and credentialing movements in education departments, professional associations, and national and local legislation.. The major accreditation body for Counselor Education/School Counseling programs is the Council for the Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs (CACREP), which provides international program accreditation in Counselor Education disciplines including school counseling.
In some countries, school counseling is provided by educational specialists (for example, Botswana, China, Finland, Israel, Malta, Nigeria, Romania, Taiwan, Turkey, United States). In other cases, school counseling is provided by classroom teachers who either have such duties added to their typical teaching load or teach only a limited load that also includes school counseling activities (for example- India, Japan, Mexico, South Korea, Zambia). The IAEVG focuses primarily on career development with some international school counseling articles and conference presentations.