How To Become A Counselor in India?: If you want to be the person who guides and understands others and helps them deal with things, you can be a successful counselor in India.
India is a place where people don’t generally open up to people, such as a counselor. Consulting and talking to a counselor is still considered taboo.
Recently, people have been opening up and accepting counselors, which creates a great opportunity. If you are a counselor, then society is starting to open up now.
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This article will guide you through all the steps and processes you must follow to become a counselor in India.
- Who Is A Counselor?
- Types Of Counselors
- Courses Available To Become a Counselor
- Eligibility Criteria To Become A Counselor in India?
- Skill-Set Required for To Become A Counselor in India?
- Why Should You Choose Counseling?
- Tips To Become A Successful Counselor
- Conclusion on How To Become A Counselor in India?
Who Is A Counselor?
A counselor is a person that listens to you and then helps you to make decisions and supports you when you need it.
A counselor can provide a lot of emotional support to the person-person. They can guide you on any issue, whether it is related to your relationship, family, career, personal issues, lifestyle, and so on.
A counselor plays the following role:-
- A counselor can work with both individuals and groups to work on their mental health and well-being. Group counseling is usually done when people are suffering from the same issues.
- A counselor can also develop and define the path to achieve your goals if you are very confused.
- A counselor can also people identify and define their targets while also taking care of the mind and health of the person.
- In many ways, a counselor can also act as a facilitator to achieve your goals.
Types Of Counselors
You can require a counselor in any sphere of your life as they are there to help and guide you through things. Although counseling is starting to boom and get recognition in India, we will talk about the most types of counselors available in India.
- School Counselor:- School counseling is an essential aspect of your child’s proper development and growth. School years can be challenging for some children as they deal with social, personal, academic, and emotional problems. The school-going years are crucial for every child, and this is when most of the children do not open up to their parents, so they require a figure or person with whom they can share their feelings.
- Rehabilitation Counselor:- These types of counselors are responsible for dealing with people with physical and emotional difficulties. A rehabilitation counselor helps people deal with physical difficulty, accidents, illness, disease, etc.
- Career Counselor:- The main job of a career counselor is to guide you in all the professional and work-related aspects of your life. If your goals are not transparent or confused, a career counselor will help you eradicate that confusion. School and college students can also opt for career counseling to help them choose a stream of selecting a path that will lead them to their goal.
- Mental Health Counselor:- Such counselors are there to help people with emotional and mental disorders. Topics like low self-esteem, anxiety, depression, grief, trauma, and so on fall under this category.
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Courses Available To Become a Counselor
Counseling is a diverse field that deals with many things, and there are a variety of subjects and specializations that fall under counseling. Some of the best specializations that you can pursue in India are as follows:-
- Clinical psychology
- Sports psychology
- Criminal psychology
- Education counselor
- Relationship counselor
- Career counselor
- Behavioral psychology
- And many more
Eligibility Criteria To Become A Counselor in India?
- Step 1:-To become a counselor in India, you must have psychology as a subject in your class 12th. Without psychology, you cannot opt for any colleges that offer psychology or counseling courses as options. If you can take up biology along with psychology, then it is the best option. Studying both these subjects together will help you understand the neurological and the physiological aspects of psychology effortlessly.
- Step 2:- Next, after completing your class 12 with psychology as a subject, you need to graduate to become a counselor. The courses you can do graduation are B.A. in psychology, B.Sc in psychology, or applied psychology. The duration for the graduation course in psychology is three years.
- Step 3:- The next step depends on your enthusiasm and interest. If you want to study further in counseling, then you can do a master’s in counseling. The best master’s courses in counseling are M.A. and M.Sc. in counseling, or you can do a master’s in applied psychology. The duration of a master’s course is two years all over in India. You can take admission in colleges for Masters’s based on your graduation marks and entrance exam grades.
- Step 4:- This is an optional step. You can pursue counseling by doing a PG Diploma. A diploma is a popular course among people who can spend a lot of time and money doing a master’s program. The diploma is a certificate course instead of a degree. The duration of this course is only one year. Some people prefer to do a one-year diploma course rather than doing a two-year master’s.
Skill-Set Required for To Become A Counselor in India?
Self-reflection: If you want to become a good counselor and genuinely know about others, you must be clear about yourself. You cannot give life advice to clients if you are not clear about your own life. Whenever you are clear about your actions and lives, you can offer better guidance to other people.
- Genuine interest:- As a counselor, you can flourish only if you have a genuine interest in helping others. If you want to help someone with their problems, you must be genuinely interested in their problems. You can only help other people if you listen and understand the issues of your client.
- Good Listener:- One of the essential parts of becoming a good counselor is that you should also be a listener. You will not understand the whole situation until and unless you properly listen to the situation.
- Authenticity:- It is a rule of counseling that any details that you share with your client should always be kept confidential no matter what. If you don’t keep the information authentic, you will quickly lose your credibility as a counselor.
- Flexibility:- A good counselor should also be quite flexible in their thinking, understanding, and approach. Having rigid thinking and practice will make things more complicated because you should listen and understand others as a counselor. Counselors should keep themselves in their shoes to fully grasp the situation from the perspectives of their clients.
- Sense of Humor:- Having a good sense of humor is a good trait as a counselor. Counseling can be quite a heavy job at times, so you must have a good sense of humor to lighten the moments and create a positive environment. Your sense of humor can help you stand out as a counselor, and sharing laughter also helps to create a positive bond. You can use this to have positive relations with your clients.
Why Should You Choose Counseling?
You should choose counseling as a field of work as it has a lot of scope in our country. People have now started opening up to mental health, and earlier, people were only concerned about their physical well-being. Now the people also consider emotional and mental well-being equally crucial to your physical well-being.
The concept of counselors has always existed in our society in the form of our elderly. Our parents most likely shared every little detail about their lives with their parents. But with the fast pace and nuclear lifestyle now popular among people, we have lost that connection with our elderly.
This is where counselors come in to fill that void. People that are not comfortable with their family and friends can share their feelings with a counselor. To you, a counselor is an anonymous person who does not judge you, making us comfortable and willing to share our details with them.
Tips To Become A Successful Counselor
Always be active and participate in internships, internships that offer you hands-on experience and exposure are the best ones. You can learn a great deal from practicing counselors daily.
- To become a good counselor, you need to be very open and accepting of all the people. The most important thing a counselor has to do is to listen and understand the other person. If you are rigid in your opinion, then you won’t be able to counsel appropriately.
- Counselors should also be calm and composed. Now making rash and impulsive decisions can backfire on a lot of occasions. So to be an effective counselor, it is necessary that you are relaxed and composed while giving valuable suggestions to your clients as a counselor.
Conclusion on How To Become A Counselor in India?
People are now enjoying a beautiful career as a counselor and earning name and fame in this field. With increasing tension, responsibilities, and health issues, people are seeking more and more counselors’ advice. So this is the right time for you to take this course if you are determined to be a counselor in India.
This article tries to give you a concise view of becoming a successful counselor in India. You will also learn about the eligibility criteria and job profiles prevalent in the counseling field of work.