Mental well-being is an essential aspect of our daily lives, making professionals like you who can lead therapy sessions, provide treatment plans, and help build coping skills a great benefit to clients and mental health organizations.
But are you using a resume template that’s able to show you have the caring and knowledgeable skill set for the job?
When you have such a big impact on your clients’ lives, organizations will want to ensure you have the right licensing and treatment background to be successful. We’ll help you create a cover letter and optimize for success with our counselor resume examples that have landed plenty of mental health professionals jobs in 2024.
Related resume examples
What Matters Most: Your Counselor Skills & Work Experience
The right counseling skills to list on your resume can vary depending on the patients you’ll be treating and organizational needs. For example, while applying to be a youth counselor, academic support and social services skills may be essential.
The job description will be helpful in the process, so look for key job skills the company emphasizes, such as crisis intervention or substance abuse counseling, that will clue you into what they’re seeking.
Here are some highly sought-after counseling skills to get you started.
9 most popular counselor skills
- Treatment Planning
- Community Outreach
- Crisis Intervention
- Family Therapy
- CBT
- Confidentiality
- Support Groups
- Social Services
- Headspace
Sample counselor work experience bullet points
In counseling, the results you can achieve for clients will be crucial. So, hiring managers will look for you to showcase how you’ve improved clients’ sense of well-being or accurately diagnosed conditions.
While counseling can be more of a qualitative process, you should still include numbers that emphasize your impact in each example, such as patient satisfaction scores or treatment adherence rates.
Also, keep each example to one sentence so hiring managers can easily identify your top skills like crisis intervention and CBT.
Here are a few samples:
- Introduced clients to the Headspace app to practice mindfulness exercises outside of sessions, reducing daily stress levels by 55%.
- Performed motivational interviewing to help clients open up during initial sessions to help diagnose conditions 23% more accurately.
- Used CBT during treatment for substance use disorders, helping clients develop coping mechanisms and life skills that decreased relapse by 64%.
- Led family therapy sessions, providing guided support that helped family members understand each other’s needs, which led to 98% positive satisfaction scores with the treatment process.
Top 5 Tips for Your Counselor Resume
- Use a mix of interpersonal and technical skills
- Counselors need an in-depth job skill set to understand clients’ feelings and provide technical treatment plans that get the best results. Therefore, using examples that use both, such as how you performed active listening during CBT sessions to diagnose conditions 67% more accurately, will work well.
- Organize the information
- Approach your resume format with the same organized mindset you’d use while outlining treatment plans for your clients. You should keep your resume well-spaced, use clear headers, and include bullet points about your key counseling achievements to provide an easily understandable overview of your abilities.
- Stay on a single page
- While several layers go into treatment planning and crisis intervention, you still want to avoid your resume getting too long since hiring managers have many applicants to review. So, keep to a one-page resume– a concise overview – while focusing on the most essential skills, such as activity planning and group leadership, when applying to be a group counselor.
- Use action words
- Just like speaking in an active voice to keep clients engaged during sessions, you can do the same on your resume to show your impact. Action words like “supported” or “organized” will help you do so.
- Proofread before submitting
- Counselors need to perform accurately during behavioral analysis and treatment program design. You can immediately show hiring managers those abilities by proofreading to submit a grammatically correct and accurate resume.
Reverse chronological formatting works best. Counseling is constantly evolving, with virtual sessions and techniques like EMDR therapy becoming more popular in treatment practices. Listing your most recent work experience first will help your most current and relevant skills stand out.
Counselors need to have the right education, such as an LPC and a bachelor’s degree in psychology. So, you should list any relevant education to showcase your knowledge and skills in diagnosis and treatment planning.
There are still many ways entry-level counselors can optimize resumes to stand out. You can add relevant details with educational achievements from obtaining your LPC, hobbies & interests like volunteering with a mental health organization, or use a career objective.
