Twenty-Five Roleplays of Developing Counselling Skills

This manual provides the professional trainer with a collection of simulated workplace situations which facilitate training in counselling skills. Role plays are provided which cover all aspects of successful counselling interviews. The situations include: the employee in debt, sexual harassment, redundancy, missed promotion, misconduct, demotivation, and underperformance. For the trainer, the manual offers pre-prepared and proven exercises to help to introduce or reinforce key aspects of counselling skills training. Individually, the situations will complement training imported from other sources or self-developed. Together, they represent a source of activities that can be used with confidence time and time again. For the role players, the situations afford a rare opportunity to put their counselling skills to the test in a controlled environment, where "mistakes" can be learned from without cost to the individual or the organization. Role playing is a sensitive activity and one that requires some understanding both of the people involved and of the process. Here the authors provide expert guidance on running role play sessions. There are detailed notes for the trainer and those "playing" the role as well as guidance for those given the task of observing and providing feedback.