The following course in Counseling for Business & Industrial is provided in its entirety by Atlantic International University's "Open Access Initiative" which strives to make knowledge and education readily available to those seeking advancement regardless of their socio-economic situation, location or other previously limiting factors. The University's Open Courses are free and do not require any purchase or registration, they are open to the public.

The course in Counseling for Business & Industrial contains the following:

• Lessons in video format with explaination of theoratical content.
• Complementary activities that will make research more about the topic , as well as put into practice what you studied in the lesson. These activities are not part of their final evaluation.
• Texts supporting explained in the video.

The Administrative Staff may be part of a degree program paying up to three college credits. The lessons of the course can be taken on line Through distance learning. The content and access are open to the public according to the "Open Access" and " Open Access " Atlantic International University initiative. Participants who wish to receive credit and / or term certificate , must register as students.

Lesson 1: History of Behavior Therapy

Built on scientific principles of behavior developed over the last 100 years, behavior therapy began in the late 1950’s. Many of the first therapeutic approaches were based on Pavlov’s concept of classical conditioning and Skinner’s work on operant conditioning. This research, along with studies on observational learning, provided a background for the development of psychotherapeutic behavioral techniques. Behavior therapists have been able to apply basic principles such as reinforcement, extinction, shaping of behavior, and modeling to help clients.

Lesson 2: Introduction of Career Counseling

The Compendium of methods and techniques employed in career counseling aims to be a synthetic presentation of the main instruments of the information, counseling and guidance practice. Such a work (alongside others introducing the legal framework, the objectives and tasks of counselors, the ethical code and the quality standards in the guidance practice, information and communication technology in career counseling, the characteristics of adult counseling, distance counseling, evaluating counselors and counseling bodies, key competences of practitioners, counseling as education, etc.), is a milestone of professional maturity in the field.

Lesson 3: History - Theoretical Background

The essence of Holland’s and his collaborators’ theoretical development consists in the fact that making vocational choices is “an extension of the personality” of any individual, who finds in the particularities of career development the road to self-assertion through interests and values. Thus, the distinct way of structuring in the personality of any individual a system of interests and attitudes shapes the direction of career guidance. The degree of compatibility between interests and a certain career choice awards personal satisfaction regarding the tasks of one’s own profession.” (Jigau, 2001).

Lesson 4: Values Clarification

In the philosophy of culture, the study of values has been developed in axiology, an independent discipline focusing on man as a creative being. In connection with human activities, values are classified into: economic, political, artistic, moral. In psychology the accent falls on the variability of values within groups and on this basis the explanation of behavioural differences is attempted. Values are leading principles of life and people seek professions in accordance with their values, personality and interests.

Lesson 5: SWOT Analysis

This is why in the 1960s and 70s much research was carried out in the field of management, especially strategic analysis (first performed by the Stanford Research Institute, USA, in a questionnaire with 250 questions applied to 5000 directors and managers of successful companies). Centralizing the results revealed that failure was caused by fragmenting among departments the essential information inside a company, which prevented the formation of a global image of the situation for the benefit of the decision-makers, slowed down short-term decisions and caused erroneous long-term strategies. In the efforts to avoid such errors, information on internal factors (positive and negative) was collected, and corroborated with external factors that impacted on the company.

Lesson 6: Observation in Career Counseling

The need to understand and make predictions regarding the behaviour of people has always been alive in history for both personal and social purposes. Introspection (self-observation) is a form of observation and supervision of one’s own person and conscience. The method was especially promoted in the dawn of psychology, considering the psyche a “circle of phenomena springing from themselves with no determinative connection to the outside” (Zlate, 1996).
Introspectionists place the study of conscious phenomena at the centre of psychology, calling them the psychology of conscience. In Wundt’s (1879) conception, internal phenomena may be understood by relating causes and observable effects. For instance, studying reaction speed can yield reasoning on temperament and mental state.

Lesson 7: Focus Group

The technique is linked to the name of two sociologists: Paul Lazarsfeld and Robert Merton (1948). Focus group are first mentioned in an article by Merton published in 1946 in „American Journal of Sociology”, but only in the 1970s did focus group investigations begin to be used on an ever larger large scale. The starting point of this type of investigation seems nevertheless to go back in time and is related on the one hand to the development of unstructured in-depth interview techniques, especially in anthropology, and on the other to group dynamics research.

Lesson 8: Group Discussion

Group discussion is one of the classical methods employed in career counseling. It initially emerged as a method with a lower degree of complexity, but in time it was perfected and numerous variants developed, such as Phillips 6/6 put forth by Donald Phillips in 1948 (Zlate, 1982). Group discussion requires the participatory involvement of group members in communication. Active participation is a strategy enhancing the development of a climate of trust, it raises the interest to work with a team, and helps share knowledge.

Lesson 9: Brainstorming in Counseling

The birth of brainstorming is considered to be 1941 when the American psychologist Osborn, advertising director in a company, realized that conventional work meetings inhibited creative idea production. This is why he attempted to develop a set of rules that should stimulate creativity.
The rules he proposed offered people the intellectual and action freedom for idea production. “To think up” was the original term for the process, which was later known as “brainstorming”. In the initiator’s conception, this could be defined as a “technique through which a group attempts to find a solution to a specific problem by collecting all spontaneous ideas of its members.”

Lesson 10: Telephone Counseling

Telephone and telephony go back to 1876, to the patent obtained by Alexander Graham Bell for the electronic transmission of sound to a distance. He made the telephone a well-known and reliable instrument and medium. The novelty nowadays intervenes with options such as: teleconference, dial-up Internet, caller ID, market competition regarding the calling rates, etc.

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