TPC Journal V7, Issue 3 - FULL ISSUE

248 The Professional Counselor | Volume 7, Issue 3 area of career exploration and planning. Counselors need to be trained adequately to provide career counseling to clients. In addition to providing relevant information, promoting thoughtful reflection, and facilitating discussions for counselors-in-training, counselor educators could provide outreach and continuing education opportunities focused on career counseling. Just as career counseling may be infused with academic and personal and social counseling for school counselors, counselor educators may consider infusing career counseling concepts throughout other courses and experiences during a training program. Counselor educators could model this authentic type of integration. Counselor educators could talk more about various career clusters and the value of career counseling throughout a training program rather than just in one specific course. Counselor educators may also facilitate discussions with counselors-in-training about their own career counseling experiences, allowing trainees time to reflect on their experience. In addition, trainees could talk about how they have worked with people in roles other than a counselor through the career exploration and planning process. Counselors need to consider ways to utilize and increase the support of administration and teachers to identify what needs to change in order for them to reallocate their time so they are able to provide more career counseling. Providing evidence of the positive impact of their work may be an effective strategy. There are many approaches to this, such as utilizing current research studies to communicate support for the value of career counseling efforts. In addition, school counselors can gather data from current students, parents, and alumni regarding their perception of and desire for career counseling services through surveys or focus groups. Once specific programs are implemented, school counselors can evaluate the outcomes of the career counseling efforts through both formal and informal assessment procedures with students, teachers, and parents. Administrators should continue to express support for the career counseling efforts of school counselors and show support by advocating for more personnel in order for students to receive adequate career counseling and to meet the demand of the non- counseling tasks that counselors are assigned. Limitations The findings should be considered in light of the limitations of the study. Because of the nature of instruments that involve self-report, the results are based on the current perception of the participants and not objective assessments of the effectiveness of their work. Also, it may be more socially and professionally desirable to have confidence in personal abilities and, therefore, some participants may have answered the way they thought they should. This study was limited to those middle school counselors who had publically available e-mail addresses and were working in Virginia. Non- respondents and middle school counselors outside of Virginia are not represented in these findings; therefore, generalizing the findings should be considered with caution. Furthermore, the 406 non- respondents and the 18 respondents who did not complete the entire survey may be systematically different from the 143 respondents who were included.  Conclusion This study has provided important new information about the self-efficacy of school counselors in the middle school setting as related to career counseling. Career counseling self-efficacy was high overall, with specific areas of deficit related to gender, ethnicity, and sexual orientation. Those school counselors who had previous teaching experience had even higher career counseling self-efficacy than those who did not. High self-efficacy in school counselors had little or no impact on the time spent providing career counseling services. Tailoring continuing education opportunities in career counseling and providing clear administrative leadership would further strengthen practicing school counselor self-efficacy. Utilizing support personnel for non-counseling–related duties may allow