Psychology (PSYC) 405

Overview

This course is intended to be of assistance to people who work with individuals seeking career development assistance, career professionals who want ideas for dealing with their clients, or groups of people who share a common interest in issues related to career development. The course is based on the premise that, regardless of their work settings, all career development professionals work with others to help produce change.

Regardless of the context, it is important for all career development practitioners to be able to establish collaborative working relationships that are founded on mutual trust and respect. In these interactions, career professionals must be able to help their clients to:

• identify the nature of the desired change and develop an action plan; and
• implement a strategy for producing the desired change

This course focuses on the first step in the above process, that is, creating a working alliance with a person, group, or agency, that will facilitate the ultimate goal of developing and implementing an intervention plan. The course describes the knowledge and skills career development practitioners need to achieve these ends. The specific areas covered include:

Knowledge

Working Alliance

• what is a working alliance
• how is a working alliance developed
• what factors influence the effectiveness of a working alliance

Partnerships and Groups

• importance of partnerships and networking in service delivery
• factors enhancing partnerships and groups

Collaboration

• attitudes involved in collaboration
• skills involved in collaboration

Problem Solving and Decision Making

• models for problem solving and decision making
• models for action planning

Skills

• basic individual communication skills
• basic group facilitation skills

Outline

Unit 1: Understanding the Working Alliance

Unit 2: Basic Communication Skills

Unit 3: More Communication Skills

Unit 4: Collaboration

Unit 5: Problem Solving and Decision Making

Unit 6: Partnerships and Groups

Unit 7: Basic Group Facilitation Skills

Evaluation

To receive credit for PSYC 405, you must complete all of the assignments, achieve a mark of at least 50 per cent on the skill assignments and the Term Paper/Project Assignment, and obtain a course composite grade of “D” (50 per cent). The weighting of the composite grade is as follows:

Quiz 1	5%
Quiz 2	5%
Skill Assignment 1	20%
Quiz 3	5%
Skill Assignment 2	30%
Term Paper or Term Project	35%
Total	100%

To learn more about assignments and examinations, please refer to Athabasca University's online Calendar.