Development of Competency Benchmarks for Counseling Psychologists in Taiwan Author:Chia-Hsin Lin, Pei-Chuan Huang
Research Article
Competency-based approach to education and training has become a high priority in the field of professional psychology. However, few research studies have been conducted on this topic in Taiwan. This study attempts to develop competency benchmarks for counseling psychologists in Taiwan. The competency benchmarks could be useful in training and evaluating counseling psychologists across different training levels. The Delphi technique was used to collect counseling experts’ criticality consensus of the competency benchmarks. A group of 29 seasoned counseling psychologists and faculty of counseling psychology were invited to participate in the study. For this study, we developed a competency questionnaire based on Rodolfa et al.’s (2005) competency cube model and Fouad et al.’s (2009) competency benchmarks. Results: (1) The 6 functional competency domains for the counseling psychologist consisted of 13 sub-domains and 60 competency benchmarks. The 6 domains are: assessment, diagnosis and conceptualization, intervention, consultation, research and evaluation, supervision, and management. (2) The Delphi experts had a high criticality consensus on all but one competency benchmark (research proposal writing ability). Among the 60 competency benchmarks, 50 (83.3%) were rated as very critical and 10 (16.7%) as critical by the Delphi experts. Implications of the study and suggestions were also discussed.