DIGEST - Volume 11, Issue 1

5 TPC Digest | TPC Digest l though burnout is a professional risk for all counselors, novice counselors may be particularly vulnerable to experiencing burnout because of unique professional demands. Despite their limited professional experience, these counselors provide many hours of direct client care and work in challenging work environments (e.g., low wages, limited support from supervisors, long hours). There are numerous conceptualizations of burnout for helping professions, like counseling; however, to date, no study has examined the self-reported symptoms of burnout experienced by a sample of novice professional counselors. Thus, in the current study, we inductively analyzed the open-ended qualitative responses of 246 novice professional counselors’ self-reported symptoms of burnout using content analysis. T welve categories and related subcategories emerged from 1,205 units. The five most commonly coded categories were negative emotional experience (18.1%), fatigue and tiredness (16.2%), unfulfilled in counseling work (11.6%), unhealthy work environment (10.6%), and physical symptoms (8.9%). There were also less commonly reported categories, such as negative coping strategies (1.8%) and psychological distress (0.7%), that could signal more serious professional issues, like impairment. T he findings from this study closely align with many of the existing conceptualizations of burnout, while also offering new insights into burnout as experienced by novice professional counselors. For example, informed by prior research, fatigue and tiredness are core symptoms of burnout for this sample. Further, to varying degrees, burnout manifests for this population through emotional, cognitive, and physical symptoms. Participants also described how challenges at their workplace led to burnout and how some were no longer deriving satisfaction from their jobs as counselors, with a small number of participants planning to leave the profession. Finally, some participants described psychological distress and using negative coping strategies (e.g., substance use) as symptoms of burnout. These collective symptoms provide a holistic picture of burnout for this population. Informed by these findings, we implore counseling scholars who study burnout to consider ways to capture these more commonly occurring symptoms (e.g., negative emotional experience) and less commonly reported symptoms (e.g., psychological distress) in their research. Novice professional counselors who are experiencing burnout are encouraged to consult with their supervisor to explore strategies for managing these symptoms. Finally, supervisors may want to use these findings to engage their supervisees in a discussion of burnout. Supervisors may also want to help protect novice professional counselors from some of the unhealthy workplace environments that were described by participants in this study. Counselors and their supervisors can work to ensure that issues of burnout are mitigated so that clients receive ethically sound services. Ryan M. Cook, PhD, ACS, LPC, is an assistant professor at the University of Alabama. Heather J. Fye, PhD, NCC, LPC, is an assistant professor at the University of Alabama. Janelle L. Jones, MS, NCC, is a doctoral student at the University of Alabama. Eric R. Baltrinic, PhD, LPCC-S (Ohio), is an assistant professor at the University of Alabama. Correspondence may be addressed to Ryan M. Cook, 310A Graves Hall, Box 870231, Tuscaloosa, AL 35475 , rmcook@ua.edu. Ryan M. Cook, Heather J. Fye, Janelle Jones, and Eric R. Baltrinic Self-Reported Symptoms of Burnout in Novice Professional Counselors A Content Analysis A