A Development of Counseling Competency for Academic Advisors in Higher Education

Southeast Asia has a high prevalence of mental health problems and a low desire to seek professional help. Low treatment rates in LMICs are also reflected in the lack of readily available treatments geared toward students. In developing countries such as Thailand, academic advisors in higher education play another extra role in providing appropriate mental health counseling beyond teaching, researching, and delivering academic advising to their students. This quasi-experimental research aimed to study counseling’s competency of academic advisors in higher education and develop counseling’s competency of academic advisors in higher education. The sample groups used in this study were academic advisors who worked in a Thai university. There were two data collection stages. In stage 1, 250 samples were selected using a multi-stage random sampling technique for examining counseling competency. In stage 2, 60 samples used in the first stage having counseling’s competency score rating from low to moderate were equally divided into two groups (control and intervention). The results in the first stage showed that the total mean score of counseling competency was moderate. In the second stage, the hypothesis-tested result also showed significant differences in counseling competency outcomes in the intervention and control groups. These findings highlight intervention; the Brief Counseling Competency Training Program (BCCTP) could be helpful for reskilling and upskilling academic advisors’ counseling competency, especially attitude dimension, and implicate set friendly services, a sustainable academic advisor network to support and strengthen these competencies.