Psychology (PSYC) 405

Overview

This course is intended to be of benefit 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 appropriate action plans; and
• implement a strategy for producing the desired change

Psychology 405 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.

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 percent). The weighting of the composite grade is as follows:

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

Course Materials

Challenge for Credit Course Overview

The Challenge for Credit process allows students to demonstrate that they have acquired a command of the general subject matter, knowledge, intellectual and/or other skills that would normally be found in a university level course.

Full information for the Challenge for Credit can be found in the Undergraduate Calendar.

• Undergraduate Challenge for Credit Policy
• Undergraduate Challenge for Credit Procedures

Challenge Evaluation

To receive credit for the PSYC 405 challenge registration, you must achieve an overall grade of at least “D”(50 percent).

Undergraduate Challenge for Credit Course Registration Form

• Challenge for Credit Form