Counselling Hub

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COUNSELLING IN AUSTRALIA

Industry Overview

The industry is suffering from an acute shortage of Allied Health staff because we just don’t have the numbers of Allied Health professionals in Australia to meet the needs of our population. Not only that, employers in many other industries such as Occupational Rehab, NDIS and the NFP sector are competing for that same pool of professionals. 

 

We find that most counselling providers are mainly private practices that are either boutique or of a small to medium size. There are also quite a few established National providers of Counselling services including EAP. 

 

A lot of NDIS providers have set themselves up as NFP counselling providers too, to be able to not only get tax breaks but also provide their staff with a suite of NFP employee benefits. We’ve found the salaries, benefits packages and work arrangements have changed substantially over the years, especially post Covid. 

 

“You walk in the rain and you feel the rain, but, importantly, YOU ARE NOT THE RAIN.” — Matt Haig

Salary

Salaries in the industry for Provisional Psychologists: 

  • Graduates: $60,000 – $75,000 base + super
  • 1-2 years’ experience: $70,000-$80,000 base + super
  • 3-5 years’ experience: $80,000 – $90,000 base + super
  • 5+ years’ experience: $100,000 base + super and above. This is when Specialist, Team Leader or Management level roles start to appear as well.

Salaries in the industry for General Psychologists: 

  • 0-3 years’ experience: $80,000 – $90,000 base + super
  • 3+ years’ experience: $90,000 – $100,000 base + super
  • 5+ years’ experience: $100,000 base + super and above. This is when Specialist, Team Leader or Management level roles start to appear as well.

Salaries in the industry for Psychologists with an endorsement:

  • 0-1 year’s experience: $90,000 – $100,000 base + super
  • 2+ years’ experience: $100,000 base + super and above
  • 3+ years’ experience: $100,000 base + super and above. This is when Specialist, Team Leader or Management level roles start to appear as well.

Salaries in the industry for Social Workers

  • Graduates: $60,000 – $70,000 base + super
  • 1-2 years’ experience: $70,000 – $80,000 base + super
  • 3-5 years: $80,000 – $95,000 base + super
  • 5+ years experience: $95,000 base + super and above. This is when Specialist, Team Leader or Management level roles start to appear as well.

Salaries in the industry for Behaviour Support Practitioners

  • Graduate: $70,000 – $75,000 base + super
  • 1-2 years’ experience: $75,000 – $85,000 base + super
  • 3-5 years’ experience: $85,000 – $100,000 base + super
  • 5+ years experience: $100,000 base + super and above. This is when Specialist, Team Leader or Management level roles start to appear as well.

Keep in mind that the above are general indicators. There are always exceptions to the rule and unique circumstances e.g. location, industry, role depth, employer salary band-widths, work arrangement etc that also determine the wages offered to job-seekers. 

 

“I love money. I love everything about it. I bought some pretty good stuff. Got me a $300 pair of socks. Got a fur sink. An electric dog polisher. A gasoline powered turtleneck sweater. And, of course, I bought some dumb stuff, too.” -Steve Martin

Benefits

What’s my competition doing? Let’s find out!

Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower. -Steve Jobs

Financial: Regular Salary Reviews | Performance Bonus | Extra Superannuation Contributions | Salary sacrifice or Salary Packaging arrangements | Corporate Discounts – one of our NFP clients gives their team discounted Medical and Health Insurance

Tools of Trade: Mobile | Laptop | Tablet  | Speech to Text Software

Admin & Reception Support: Free up time by dictating your reports and let the admin team do the rest

Travel: Pool Car Access | Novated Lease | Per km reimbursement | GoGet Car Access | Set amount per timeframe | Petrol Card (one of our clients gives their team members a petrol card for work and personal use – booya!)

Knowledge & Assessment Suitcase: Subscriptions, both hard-copy and soft-copy | Professional development funds, comprehensive induction | On-going mentoring and in-services by subject matter experts

IN-HOUSE SUPERVISION!!!!!!! Sorry for shouting but have you checked the cost of paying for an AHPRA Accredited Board Approved Supervisor lately? It costs a motza!!!! So, if you are able to, then provide the in-house supervision that so many Provisional or Endorsement Registrars seek. 

Extra Leave: One of our clients is a school and they give their staff 7 weeks’ leave. OK, OK, we know not every employer can provide this. Buuuuut, other clients give their staff reservist leave, doona days, volunteer, pet and birthday leave. Another employer lets their staff buy extra leave. The details on that are confidential, but this has proven to be a winner with their staff. Gentle hint. 

Parental Leave: One of our clients gives their staff the difference between their wage and the government mandated parental leave subsidy for the full 16 weeks. The NDIS industry is heavily female dominated in terms of Allied Health professionals working in it. Now read that again.

Social and team building activities: Paid for by the company. One of our clients paid for their whole team to do axe-throwing and a cooking class – not on the same day….

Health, Wellness & EAP: Pool, yoga  or gym access or contribution | Confidential EAP to assist you when you need a hand 

Career Mapping: Our clients spend a lot of time and money training and supporting you. They would like to see you mutually thrive. Your success and growth = their success and growth.

If you’re wondering what other employers are doing to attract talent, it may be time to look at your benefits packages, job-structure or hiring, on-boarding and training protocol.

“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.” —Alice Walker

Job Structure

  • Full-time
  • Part-time
  • WFH
  • Work from the office
  • Community-based
  • Mobile
  • Telehealth
  • Face-to-face
  • Contracting

Locations

Wherever there is a person with a mental health issue, a mental health professional will be required. So that pretty much means anywhere and everywhere in Australia.

Hiring

“Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken.” – Oscar Wilde

Some employers have a 3 step recruitment process:

  1. A screening by internal HR. 
  2. First interview
  3. Second interview and reference checks.

This is not to mention possible psych, probity or technical skills testing. For this to happen, the job-seekers and employers have to match diaries etc. 

 

Some employers still insist on a face to face meeting as a first port of call. Just keep in mind that in an exceptionally candidate-short market and where job-seekers are looking at multiple employers at the same time, it might help to reexamine your hiring process. Especially if you keep missing out on candidates as they’ve accepted other offers while you’re still going through the motions of your recruitment process.

 

The other thing candidates have told us is employers who get shirty if the job-seeker doesn’t accept their offer and then say things along the lines of, OK, you’ve got 24 hours to accept our offer or we will withdraw it. We don’t recommend this generally because it puts pressure on a candidate to make a decision. And once you’ve made that call, you can’t go back, ie say, OK fine, you’ve actually got 3 days to make a decision.

 

It’s a fine balance we admit, but please reach out to your Medijobs Australia consultant if you’re wondering what candidates are saying about your recruitment process. We’ve been known to not mince words and give honest feedback. We’re also happy to work with you to let you know what’s working and what’s not in terms of best process hiring protocols. 

 

“When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be.” – Lao Tzu

Candidates Love

Passion: When Psychologists, Social Workers or BSP can see the results of the work that they do, the work that they have studied and worked so hard to be able to do, there/s no more beautiful sight than that.

 

“A mind that is stretched by new experiences can never go back to its old dimensions.” —Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Salaries that reflect their skills and experience for the job that they are doing.

 

Benefits packages customised to their needs – for instance, they may prefer a novated lease option if they don’t own or have access to a car. 

 

Induction: A comprehensive on-boarding and induction process when they start as well as on-going mentoring, in-services, CPD contributions and shadowing of senior consultants. 

 

KPIs: Graded introduction to KPIs so that the pressure to bill, bill, bill isn’t hanging over their heads from day dot.

 

Career-mapping: A strategic approach to the next steps in their career as opposed to an ad hoc approach. It’s always good to know what you have to do to achieve your career goals.

 

Health and Wellness: Employer contributions towards health and wellness, including access to a confidential EAP service.

 

Admin support: Who doesn’t love the admin team where you have access to voice to text services and the admin team takes care of the rest. Report writing becomes less of a chore then.

 

Extra leave: Any extra leave that employers can offer is welcome. Be that “no reason needed days off”, Reservist’s Leave, pet leave, volunteer leave. You can call it anything you like but what the job-seeker sees is that this employer is amazing as they recognise the need for a day off sometimes.

 

“If it scares you, it might be a good thing to try.” —Seth Godin

 

Parental Leave and flexibility: Most job-seekers tend to eventually start a family at some stage of their working life. It helps if the employer can give additional benefits, e.g.  One of our key employer partners offers their staff the difference between their company wage and the government mandated parental leave payment – for the whole 16 weeks. And guess who gets the candidates when it comes down to that being the final difference if all the other benefits and salary between competing offers are the same. Bingo! And they also offer their staff the option of a combination of WFH and part-time hours when they return to work after their parental leave. Bingo squared! Or is that Bingo x 2?

 

“When the grass looks greener on the other side of the fence, it may be that they take better care of it there.” — Cecil Selig

 

Pool car access: We’ve found over 20 years of recruitment that job-seekers don’t want wear and tear on their personal vehicles for work purposes. So they LOOOOVE pool-car access as this means they can take public transport to work and still do their job.

Candidates Hate

Over promise and under deliver: There is absolutely no percentage in over selling the role only for the job-seekers to start and find out that the reality on the ground floor is very different. If you have a high rate of candidates leaving your employ in a short space of time, then it is a good idea to conduct exit interviews to see where you are letting them and yourself as an employer down.

 

Lack of or no on-boarding and induction: Do this at your own peril. Enough said

 

Travel: A lot of candidates don’t like to travel long distances if possible. Sometimes it can’t be helped. But then the employer needs to recognise that their billable targets might need adjusting to account for the time spent travelling. It’s important to put yourself in your employees shoes. Would you feel extra pressure if that was what you had to do? Then rest assured, they are too. Unrelenting pressure = a good reason to start looking for a new job. You do the maths. 

 

Lack of business structure: We could tell you many anecdotes of newly set up employers who call us and say, we’ve just set up and we need a General or Clinical Psychologist, yesterday. OK, say we. Could you please send us a job description? Don’t have one. Right, what kinds of clients are you working with? Don’t know yet – whatever walks in the door but there’s a lot of demand for our services. Ahem. Do tell us about your induction and training process. We’re working on that. At this point in time, we don’t even bother asking about their strategic growth plans or career-mapping for their staff.  See where we’re going with this? If you’re reading this and it even remotely sounds like you, then please address this situation. It’s tricky enough for job-seekers when they start a new job but if the workplace is a shemozzle from day dot, the chances of them staying for the long haul are low, really, really low….just saying.

 

“There are no shortcuts to any place worth going.” —Beverly Sills

Money: If you are not keeping up with the industry in terms of salaries and benefits to match what your competition is doing or what job-seeker expectations are, then please be prepared to lose staff or not be able to attract them to begin with. 

 

Burn-out: Being a Mental Health professional can lead to burn-out if self-care strategies aren’t out into place for your team. So all the Health, wellness and EAP support services that you are able to provide for your Mental Health practitioners is not only appreciated but essential. 

 

Job-Structure: Candidates have told us time and time again that as they progress through their career, the demands on their time change. They may have a family or want to work in a more flexible capacity for their own self actualisation. An employer who doesn’t work with their staff on this ( only if the employer has the capacity to accommodate the employees demands of course ) risks losing them to one who can offer them the flexibility that they seek. Telehealth anyone? 

 

“If you want to achieve greatness, stop asking for permission.” —Eddie Colla

Training

On-boarding: Have you conducted all your checks and balances that you need to do before the candidate starts?  Do they have all the paperwork that they need to fill out for you prior to starting on day dot? Please make sure they do. 

 

Induction: Do you have your poo in one pile with a structured induction process? A scatter-gun approach at the start ensures that a new employee is not going to know if they’re Artha or Martha. The more you can support, train, mentor and assist them with settling into their role, the better.  We have noticed that a lot of established Counselling employers have exceptionally comprehensive induction and training processes to support their new starters. If you tend to have an ad hoc approach in this area, we highly recommend addressing that situation, pronto. 

 

Shadowing a senior: This has proven to be a very popular strategy with our new starters in the industry. It means that they see excellent modelling and there’s nothing better than learning from the best of the best of what your company has to offer. Not to mention the social aspect of being mentored by an in-house Senior team member.

 

“Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.” —William James

In-services: Subject matter experts, both internal and external can be utilised to share their knowledge with your team members. These can be delivered remotely as well as face to face. Who doesn’t like the idea of learning as part of their work team or sharing their knowledge with their colleagues?

 

“If you want to be a true professional, do something outside yourself.” —Ruth Bader Ginsburg

CPD: All we can say is that the more generous you are here, the more likely you are to be able to support your staff through various stages of their career-map with you. 

 

“Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do”. –Steve Jobs

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