09/01/2025

Balancing Act: How Counselor Educators Can Effectively Support New Professionals

By Katelyn R. Niznik, Maddie Portnoy, and Michael J. Stebleton

New career development professionals and students-in-training often face the challenge of working with clients while managing their own professional boundaries and mental well-being (Goñi et al., 2024; Wicks, 2022). Counselor educators occupy important roles in supporting emerging professionals to develop these skills. Many new professionals, having recently searched for jobs or completed degrees themselves, are uniquely positioned to relate to clients in post-secondary contexts to understand the pressures they face, especially when it comes to balancing academics, career development, and mental health. This article offers some strategies for counselor educators as they support students-in-training and novice career practitioners, including how new professionals’ perspectives can be viewed as an asset, rather than a deficit, when coaching students and promoting student mental health.

Career Development and Mental Health as Overlapping Concerns

Mental health issues are common among students across all levels (Lee et al., 2021; Salimi et al., 2023). Career development educators occupy important roles in addressing mental health concerns (Tang et al., 2021). Poor mental health can negatively impact success –and influence career satisfaction (Redekopp & Huston, 2019). For example, the American College Health Association’s (ACHA) Fall 2024 National College Health Assessment IIIb (NCHA) survey indicated that approximately 77% of students reported experiencing moderate or high stress within the past month. New professionals, who have recently graduated and successfully navigated some of these stressors, are in ideal positions to support younger clients –and counselor educators can assist professionals with managing these challenging roles.

Positionality of New Career Development Professionals and Role of Counselor Educators

Applying their classroom and practical experiences, counselor educators can shape the skills of new career practitioners. More specifically, they can teach new professionals and graduate students about the benefits of building rapport; this guidance helps emerging practitioners to connect with clients, while also establishing professional boundaries. Appropriate self-disclosure serves as an effective strategy to build client rapport. New career development professionals and students-in-training, who often share similar life experiences with younger clients, can empathize with how challenging and vulnerable it feels to be a job seeker and can validate a client’s experience. Additionally, normalizing a client’s feelings and experiences during a job search can promote a sense of belonging and mental health. 

However, relating so directly to a client’s experiences can present its own obstacles, such as maintaining credibility as a career development professional, and counselor educators must relay the careful balance between relatability and expertise. It is important to connect with a client while also maintaining trust to provide accurate knowledge and tools for job searching (Sheehan, 2022). Furthermore, it can be easy to insert bias and assumptions about job searching based on personal experiences, which can inadvertently influence the advice provided to clients. In response, counselor educators could apply the Social Penetration Theory (Altman & Taylor, 1973) to support early career development professionals in clarifying boundaries and overcoming these obstacles.  

Guiding Framework: Levels of Disclosure

Counselor educators often use theory to guide practice for emerging professionals. Altman and Taylor’s (1973) Social Penetration Theory includes four key levels of self-disclosure, serving as a foundation for better understanding self-disclosure principles and setting boundaries. The framework is depicted as the layering of an onion, with layers pulled back towards the core. 

• Superficial (most distal layer): Safe, surface-level information such as academic background or favorite study spots - building rapport without crossing boundaries.
• Intimate: Involves a more nuanced understanding of others to further build rapport (e.g., political views, students’ academic interests)
• Personal: Opinions or experiences that connect to student concerns, such as sharing our own job search anxieties. Use sparingly and strategically to validate a student’s feelings.
• Core (most proximal layer): Deep beliefs of identity and self-concept, reserved for our closest relationships and rarely appropriate in professional client interactions.

Typically, the most effective disclosures in student support fall somewhere between superficial and personal. This approach aligns with Career Construction Theory (Savickas, 2020), which emphasizes the role of storytelling and meaning-making in shaping one’s professional identity. Similarly, counselor educators can integrate narrative approaches into the curriculum. Sharing selected personal stories, especially those that demonstrate resilience, adaptability, or values, can support students and new professionals to begin to make sense of their own narratives (Thahir & Bulantika, 2021). However, the key lies in ensuring that appropriate self-disclosure supports the client’s development, not the counselor’s own needs to share. For example, disclosing a brief story about navigating a career shock can illustrate adaptability (Akkermans et al., 2021), but, diving into deep emotional details might shift focus away from the student and into the core disclosure level. 

Case Study: Jordan, an Undergraduate Student Entering the Job Market

We highlight these issues of self-disclosure by presenting a fictitious case study. Counselor educators can use this case scenario as a strategy to engage students via a role play exercise, translating theory into practice. 

Overview of case: Jordan is a senior at a four-year university who is working with you, a new career professional on campus. He is seeking a full-time job and shares with you that he has severe anxiety about his interviewing skills. Jordan recently struggled in an interview and did not get the job. Jordan is worried about the next time he is offered an interview. 

You are new to your role as a career coach and did multiple interviews before finding your current position. You also experience anxiety about interviewing, to the point that it is difficult to sleep before an interview. You relate to Jordan’s experience and want to be empathetic, while also maintaining your credibility as a career coach. 

Strategies and Implications

Using Jordan’s case as a learning opportunity, several suggestions and strategies are offered that educators can convey to counselors-in-training.

• Reflect on your boundaries and appropriate self-disclosure that could help build rapport with Jordan. The counselor can relate to the job seeker’s concerns, yet the focus should remain on the client/student.
• Educators can acknowledge that mental health and career-related concerns are integrated. Depending on training, the counselor may need to refer Jordan to a mental health professional if his anxiety is a larger issue.
• Maintaining one’s own self-care as a career professional is critical (Slovholt & Trotter-Mathison, 2016). Become knowledgeable about other wellbeing and self-care resources on campus or the community that can serve as support (Pappano, 2025). 
• Encourage intentionally facing one’s concerns. In the case of Jordan, his uncertainty around interviewing will likely decrease with more practice, such as completing mock interviews. 
• Counselor educators can challenge clients to build and re-write their own narratives. In Jordan’s case, the educator can work with him to create a new narrative of overcoming his anxiety around interviews, and then, finding meaningful employment (Stebleton & Franklin, 2023).

Career educators, including counselor educators in diverse career development spaces, play important roles in supporting clients’ career issues and mental health. By recognizing the unique strengths that new career development professionals bring–including relatability and recent lived experiences–we can reframe early-career status not as a limitation, but as an asset in promoting growth and mental well-being.

References

Akkermans, J., Rodrigues, R., Mol, S. T., Seibert, S. E., & Khapova, S. N. (2021). The role of career shocks in contemporary career development: Key challenges and ways forward. Career Development International, 26(4), 453-466. https://doi.org/10.1108/cdi-07-2021-0172  

Altman, I., & Taylor, D. (1973). Social penetration: The development of interpersonal relationships. Holt.

American College Health Association. (2025). American college health association-National college health assessment III: Reference group executive summary fall 2024. American College Health Association.

Goñi, F., Quiroga, L., Venegas-Muggli, J. I., & Gallardo, G. (2024). Career development experiences: A qualitative study of graduates from a Chilean technical-professional higher education institution. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 38(2), 282–297. https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2024.2367047 

Lee, J., Jeong, H. J., & Kim, S. (2021). Stress, anxiety, and depression among undergraduate students during the COVID-19 pandemic and their use of mental health services. Innovative Higher Education, 46(5), 519-538. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10755-021-09552-y 

Pappano, L. (2025, May 20). For new grads, landing a job may be hard. Navigating the workplace may be harder. The Hechinger Report. https://hechingerreport.org/for-new-grads-landing-a-job-may-be-hard-navigating-the-workplace-may-be-harder/ 

Redekopp, D. E., & Huston, M. (2019). The broader aims of career development: Mental health, wellbeing and work. British Journal of Guidance & Counselling, 47(2), 246-257. https://doi.org/10.1080/03069885.2018.1513451 

Salimi, N., Gere, B., Talley, W., & and Irioogbe, B. (2023). College students mental health challenges: Concerns and considerations in the COVID-19 pandemic. Journal of College Student Psychotherapy, 37(1), 39-51. https://doi.org/10.1080/87568225.2021.1890298 

Savickas, M. L. (2020). Career construction and counseling model. In S. D. Brown & R. W. Lent (Eds.), Career development and counseling: Putting theory and research to work (3rd ed., pp. 165-199). Wiley.

Sheehan P. (2022) The paradox of self-help expertise: How unemployed workers become professional career coaches. American Journal of Sociology, 127(4), 1151–1182. https://doi.org/10.1086/718471 

Skovholt, T., & Trotter-Mathison, M. (2016). The resilient practitioner: Burnout and compassion, fatigue prevention, and self-care strategies for the helping professions (3rd ed.). Routledge.

Stebleton, M. J., & Franklin, M. (2023). Applying narrative approaches to support undergraduate career decision-making. In M. Buford, M. Sharp, & M. J. Stebleton (Eds.), Mapping the future of undergraduate career education: Equitable career learning, development, and preparation for a new world of work (pp. 183-199). Routledge. 

Tang, M., Montgomery, M. L. T., Collins, B., & Jenkins, K. (2021). Integrating career and mental health counseling: Necessity and strategies. Journal of Employment Counseling, 58(1), 23-35. https://doi.org/10.1002/joec.12155 

Thahir, A., & Bulantika, S. Z. (2021). The effect of physical appearance and counselors age on students self-disclosure. Turkish Online Journal of Qualitative Inquiry, 12(3), 2077-2085. 

Wicks, R. (2022, August 11). Rethinking the role of student adviser. Inside Higher Ed. https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2022/08/12/advisers-can-play-new-roles-mitigating-student-anxieties-opinion 

Katelyn R. Niznik is a Senior Career Coach at the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities. She holds a B.A. in Business Administration from Dordt University and a Master's in Higher Education from the University of Minnesota. Her research interests include the intersection of career development and mental health, Artificial Intelligence's impact on career development, student resilience and self-efficacy, and other emerging trends in higher education. Katie can be reached at kniznik@umn.edu and via LinkedIn

Maddie Portnoy is a Career Consultant in Career & Internship Services at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. She holds a B.A. in Psychology from the University of Vermont, and a Master's in Higher Education from the University of Minnesota. Her research interests focus on sense of belonging, help-seeking behaviors, and first-generation students. Maddie can be reached at mportnoy@umn.edu.

Michael J. Stebleton, PhD, is a Professor of Higher Education in the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. His teaching and research interests focus on college student and career development issues. This year he is a faculty fellow at the University Honors Program where he will be teaching an undergraduate course titled, What Is College For? Examining the Purpose and Value of US Higher Education. Mike can be reached at steb0004@umn.edu and via Linked In.