Designing, Developing and Validating a Career Empowerment Program for Online Counselors and its Effectiveness on Job Self-Efficacy

Aim: Psychological counseling, supervision and consultation in the online setting have become widespread. The aim of this study was to design, develop and validate a career empowerment program for online counselors and its effectiveness on job self-efficacy. Methods: The present research was conducted in two stages. In the first stage, career empowerment sessions were developed after reviewing the literature and existing concepts in online counseling. Then, 5 psychology and counseling experts determined the content validity of the sessions. In the second stage, a semi-experimental design with pre-test, post-test and a control group, with a follow-up 2 months was used. The statistical population included online counselors in Tehran (Iran) in winter of 2024, who were evaluated by two-stage sampling. In the first stage, screening was done based on subjective sampling. In the second stage, based on the simple random method, 20 people were selected from among the qualified counselors with the inclusion and exclusion criteria of the study and were randomly assigned to the experimental and control groups (10 individuals each). The career empowerment program was administered to the experimental group for 7 sessions, and after 2 month, a follow-up was done. Data was collected using job self-efficacy questionnaire of Riggs and Knight (1994). Findings: The results indicated that career empowerment program has acceptable content validity. Furthermore, the results of training intervention showed that career empowerment program significantly increase the symptoms of job self-efficacy in online counselors (F=21/433, sig=0.001) and this effect was also significant in the follow-up phase. Conclusion: Career empowerment program can be considered as a valid and effective program for increase job self-efficacy in online counselors.