Customer Reviews

Career Counseling Over the Internet

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There is a dearth of resources on career counselling online, and this book is one of the few that fills the gap. It offers a good defence of cybercounselling, and takes the time to consider what cybercounselling actually means, as well as distinguishing between 'career planning' and 'career counselling' and arguing for the latter as a needed online service.

The author's own history as an online counsellor - a role she more or less stumbled into - is used throughout to reinforce and provide evidence for her arguments. The examples she produces here are certainly useful and do provide illustration of certain points. However, it makes the coverage of the subject very anecdotal and lacking in academic rigour. One person's experience does not a research study make.

To a degree, Boer is not attempting to offer a definitive study of online counselling; she states in her introduction that she's using her experience to illustrate the possibilities and the way in which online counselling fits with ethical guidelines and professional competencies. However, on the book's cover the claim is made that it presents 'an emerging model for trusting and responding to online clients' - and it does not quite go that far. Nevertheless, for anyone wanting to know more about how online counselling works in practice it is a useful read.

However, what is very irritating and unprofessional (and it's taken my rating down from a 4 to a 3) is the amount of errors in the text. This book needed a good proof-reader. There are numerous punctuation errors; Boer does not know how to use the comma. There are typos. There is carelessness: the states as opposed to the States on one occasion, missing letters, missing words. This does not reflect very well on Boer as an effective online communicator, and in fact I did notice that some of her email responses to clients, quoted in the text, equally contained spelling and grammatical errors. If this is how she writes to international clients whose first language is not English, it isn't setting a very good example.

Overall, though, I can recommend this book as a good introduction to the possible where cybercounselling is concerned, as long as readers don't expect it to be any more than it is.