Hello there! This is a quick update from the fast-paced Institute Head Office! I’ve got some quick news and recommendations to share with you – but before moving towards that, let me THANK YOU for being an assiduous reader of our Blog.

In the past few months, we have consistently observed a considerable increase in our daily visitors. People from all around the world and from all walks of life are reading and commenting on Blog posts. As a result, we have been posting more than ever!

So what is new in the industry?

The Australian Counselling Association (ACA) and the British Association for Counsellors and Psychotherapists (BACP) are co-hosting the inaugural Asia-Pacific Rim Counselling Conference. This event, themed “Coming Together of Neighbours”, has successfully struck a chord, and many people from diverse educational, social and economic backgrounds have shown avid interest in this conference. The conference will be held in Hong Kong, In July.

For more information, visit www.asiapacificrimcounselling.com.

And the Institute?

Well, many of our readers are already aware that we’ve recently launched a Bachelor of Counselling and Certificate and Diploma Vocational Graduate qualifications.

The Bachelor of Counselling is a tertiary qualification, equivalent in level to Bachelor qualifications offered by universities.  The Vocational Graduate qualifications are both equivalent in level to post graduate qualifications offered by universities and include a focus on specialist application in the counselling role. 

For more information, click on the following links (you can also download the respective prospectuses from the right-side column of this Blog, under “course information”):

Bachelor of Counselling – www.aipc.net.au/degree
Vocational Graduate Qualifications – www.aipc.net.au/vgd

Blog Updates

We’re developing an index system to make content-search and navigation at Counselling Connection easier and smoother – we expect this new system to be available within the next two to three months. We’ll also be officially launching another eBook in the next few weeks. This publication will have great and unique content for counselling and mental health professionals, and will again be available for free.

To find out when the launch will occur, and download your copy; make sure you subscribe to our Blog updates by entering your email address on the appropriate box at the right-side column. It is a useful little feature!

Editor’s Picks

Finally, we continually encourage our readers to undertake professional development, whether it is through reading articles, doing short courses, participating on seminars and other events, or writing articles through eZines and other methods. For that purpose, I’ll recommend two portals that can boost your knowledge of the industry and augment your professional development.

The first one is the Counselling Academy. Counselling Academy is a leading provider of professional development education for the counselling and mental health industry. The diverse range of courses is delivered online for convenient access. Many courses are supported by video and audio presentation to enhance your learning experience.

There are already over 3,500 industry members in Australia who are taking advantage of the flexibility and convenience offered by the Academy’s online courses - and a growing number of UK residents are also joining in after the recent launch of the website’s UK version.

For more information, visit www.counsellingacademy.com.au or www.counsellingacademy.co.uk.

The second one is PsychSplash. PsychSplash is a personal project that seeks to showcase the psychology-related sites discovered by Dr. Gareth Furber - BPsych (Hons), PhD (Clinical Psychology). Although the main audience for this website is professional psychologists and students, the Blog offers information to anyone interested in the field – and a lot of it. If you are looking for mental health-related resources on the web, PsychSplash is your one-stop shop.

For more information, visit www.psychsplash.com.

That’s it for now – in the next post we will continue our ‘Special Report’ on Communicating with Children. Keep in touch with our team (we’ll soon be introducing new team members in our ‘support team’ category) via posts or by emailing blog@aipc.net.au. And have a great week!

Regards,

Editor.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 10th, 2008 at 12:13 pm and is filed under News and Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.