The Post-COVID Counselor

A Concerning Dip in Clinical Readiness

The counseling profession has always held a delicate mandate, hold people’s pain with competence, humility, and ethical discipline. Yet, in the years since COVID-19, a meaningful decline in the clinical readiness of new counselors has become visible. This isn’t nostalgia or broad condemnation. It is a sober acknowledgment of developmental disruptions affecting many counselors trained during the pandemic, particularly those completing most of their programs virtually.

I’ve spent my career supervising provisionally licensed counselors and teaching in counselor education. Over the past four years, the patterns are increasingly clear: many counselors trained during COVID entered the field with weaker clinical skills, less grounded identity formation, and less confidence navigating complex interpersonal processes. This is showing up in fundamentals: case conceptualization, clinical presence, ethical reasoning, professional identity, and tolerance for ambiguity.

Here’s what I observed, what research confirms happened, and why the stakes are high.

Training in Crisis Mode Became Normalized

When COVID shut down campuses, counselor education programs pivoted online almost overnight. Some adjusted well; others simply got through. Emergency shifts to digital instruction fundamentally altered how students learned counseling skills (Hoover et al., 2022; McAuliffe et al., 2021). Skills courses and clinical supervision, which rely heavily on embodied practice, became simulated and distant. Students lost the peer observation, co-regulated learning, and informal mentoring that support professional identity development. As a result, many graduates became fluent in counseling language but inexperienced in counseling presence.

Telehealth Shaped Habits That Did Not Transfer

Telehealth provided life-saving access during the pandemic. But training exclusively online also confined students to a narrowed experiential range. Research has since noted reduced nonverbal attunement, weaker boundary management, and diminished in-session emotional tolerance among inexperienced telehealth-trained clinicians (Glueck, 2023; Gaffney et al., 2022).

In-person therapy undoubtedly draws on subtle cues; somatic shifts, silence, pacing, eye contact, etc., that do not always translate well through compressed virtual sessions.

Now, many new clinicians appear over-reliant on verbal interventions, underdeveloped in somatic and process awareness, and hesitant to sit in emotional discomfort (their own and the clients).

Gatekeeping Softened

During COVID, the pressure to maintain enrollment and progression led many programs to loosen policies governing clinical skills, admissions, and gatekeeping (CACREP, 2021; Lenz & Smith, 2023). Some supervisors passed interns who lacked readiness, and remediation became inconsistent. The implicit message, it seems, is completion matters more than competence. I truly believe this is ethically precarious and clinically risky.

Professional Identity Formation Was Disrupted

Professional identity grows through community, modeling, apprenticeship, and embodied practice (Limberg et al., 2023; Moss et al., 2014). We know when education became fully virtual, students missed shared classroom culture, hallway discussions, co-regulated learning, tacit skill transmission, and informal mentorship. You know catching a professor between classes and having those hall-way conversations. Without in-person socialization, many students reported weaker professional identity (Lenz & Smith, 2023; Hoover et al., 2022), which is a predictor of poorer counseling skill and lower self-efficacy. They may know what counselors do but not who they are as counselors.

Counseling Became Over-Intellectualized

Online instruction often gave primacy to theory and content over process and presence. A growing proportion of early-career counselors conceptualize their role as dispensing tools, tips, and psychoeducation, rather than facilitating relational depth (Moss et al., 2021). This mirrors broader societal trends toward social-media mental-health language, skill-first process-second thinking, therapist-as-content-provider, competence is not worksheets, acronyms, or symptom management. Competence is capacity for deep formulation, attunement, pacing, and ethical discernment. Interventions are tools. The relationship is the work!

Market Demand Rewarded Speed Over Mastery

The mental-health boom following COVID created unprecedented demand. Agencies, private practices, and tech-based platforms hired aggressively. Entry-level clinicians could find placement quickly, sometimes with minimal supervision or training (APA, 2022; Psych Hub, 2022). But what were the consequences? We can answer that…fewer developmental opportunities, quick transition to private practice, weak supervision infrastructure, and performance pressure without mentorship. Some graduates pursued branding and business development before grounding in clinical mastery, an imbalance encouraged by the marketplace.

The Cost

Well, clients felt it first with shallow sessions, poor clinical formulation, weak cultural humility, mishandled trauma, poor and avoidant risk assessment, and un-recognized transference dynamics. Clinical supervisors, including myself reported more remediation needs, lower insight, defensive responses to feedback, difficulty integrating theory into practice, turnover increased, outcomes suffered, and burnout spiked (ACA, 2023; APA, 2022).

The Way Forward

What do we do? Of course, I don’t have all the answers, but research gives us some orientation for where to start. Counselor education must reinforce mandatory in-person skills training (to the extent possible), higher expectations during practicum and internship, clearer gatekeeping policies, and competency-based assessment. Graduate students deserve strong training; clients deserve competent clinicians.

Strengthen Supervision Structures

Supervision remains the single biggest predictor of early-career clinical growth (Borders et al., 2021). Counseling programs and institutions must compensate supervisors adequately, train instructors consistently, and protect supervisor evaluative authority. Supervision must be formative, developmental, and uncompromising in standards.

Hybrid and online models will certainly remain an avenue for training new counselors but must integrate real counseling rooms, real client encounters, real group process, and real crisis management. Presence cannot be learned solely through a webcam.

Normalize Slow, Deep Growth

The profession must counter the pressure toward speed. The deepest clinicians develop through mentorship, repetition, feedback, humility, emotional stamina, and reflective practice. There is no shortcut.

Conclusion

We are graduating too many counselors who are not clinically prepared for the realities of modern practice. COVID did not invent these trends, but it accelerated them, especially for students trained predominantly online. This is a moment for recalibration. If we reinforce rigor, supervision, presence-based training, and developmental mentorship, we can strengthen the next generation of counselors and protect the integrity of the profession.

Clients and the future of the profession deserve nothing less.

Jamaal A. Crone, MAR, M.Ed., LPC

References

American Counseling Association. (2023). Annual report on counselor workforce trends.

American Psychological Association. (2022). Psychology practitioner workforce review.

Borders, L. D., Glosoff, H., Welfare, L., Hays, D., & DeKruyf, L. (2021). Best practices in clinical supervision. Journal of Counseling & Development, 99(1), 1–10.

CACREP. (2021). COVID-19 modifications to training standards.

Gaffney, J., Stanley, B., & Rose, M. (2022). Training novice counselors through telehealth: Lessons from COVID-19. Journal of Technology in Behavioral Science, 7(4), 812–820.

Glueck, C. (2023). Virtual presence and counselor development: A qualitative analysis of counselor trainees during COVID-19. Counselor Education & Supervision, 62(2), 145–162.

Hoover, S., Meyer, D., & Smith, K. (2022). Disrupted development: Clinical skill acquisition in counselor trainees during a pandemic. Journal of Counselor Preparation & Supervision, 15(1), 23–37.

Lenz, A. S., & Smith, R. (2023). Wellness, professional identity, and preparedness among post-pandemic counseling trainees. Counselor Education & Supervision, 62(3), 245–259.

Limberg, D., Lambie, G., & Mullen, P. (2023). Professional identity formation in counseling trainees: The role of mentorship and community. The Professional Counselor, 13(2), 87–105.

Moss, J., Gibson, D., & Dollarhide, C. (2021). Content, identity, and the novice counselor: Clinical development during COVID. Counselor Education & Supervision, 61(1), 56–73.

Moss, J., Gibson, D., & Dollarhide, C. (2014). Professional identity development: A grounded theory analysis. Counselor Education & Supervision, 53(3), 248–263.

Psych Hub. (2022). Behavioral health workforce report: Post-COVID trends.