08/01/2026

Career Counselor Educators and Artificial Intelligence: Attitudes and Actions

By Hongshan Shao and Barbara Parker-Bell

Artificial Intelligence in Counseling

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming the educational and professional environment, including career counseling and counselor education. Counselors in training showed a cautiously optimistic attitude of AI as a resource for counseling practice while recognizing the need for careful oversight and ethical use (Gonzalez & McCalla, 2025). As AI becomes prevalent in education and workforce, career counselor educators are challenged to better incorporate AI into training and practice.

AI has been increasingly used across clinical practice and counseling training, such as generated responses, automated feedback, and simulated clients. For example, GPT 4 has demonstrated the ability to generate realistic client responses and narratives for counseling training simulations (Tian et al., 2025). AI can generate automated feedback on counseling performance through intelligent tutoring systems to support counselor training (Rudolph et al., 2024).​​ AI simulated clients have been used to provide counselor trainees with opportunities to practice counseling skills in a flexible, low risk learning environment (Akkurt et al., 2025).​​ Beyond training, AI can effectively provide career related information and guidance, although human counselors remain more effective in promoting career decision self-efficacy (Yang et al., 2026).​​

Although practical frameworks have been proposed to support the ethical integration of AI into teaching and supervision, many counselors and counselor educators hesitate to engage with AI because of the ethical complexities and risks (Shoemaker et al., 2025). Counseling professionals recognize the potential benefits of AI while simultaneously expressing concerns about ethical implementation, professional identity, and preparedness for its use (Crofford et al., 2026). Given the need for counselor trainees to understand both the benefits and risks of AI, counselor educators are increasingly responsible for preparing future practitioners to use these technologies critically and responsibly (Shoemaker et al., 2025).​​ Shoemaker et al. (2025) provided a practical framework to help counselor educators integrate AI into teaching, supervision, and clinical training through structured and ethically informed applications.​​ The National Career Development Association (NCDA, n.d.) also provides an overview of AI and related resources, including its definition, rationale, and applications in career development. Given the hesitation toward AI among counselor educators, the next challenge is translating those attitudes into meaningful and intentional action.

Model for Action

Career practitioners can use tools designed to facilitate positive career development task management to address their own anxieties or barriers to navigating and creating strategies for AI integration in career counseling coursework. Hirschi (2020) identified a four step career counseling framework to support exploration and achievement of desired work life roles. These steps include clarifying goals, mapping resources and barriers, developing action strategies, and monitoring and adapting following a review of progress. As an example of applying this framework to career counselor education acclimation to AI use in the classroom, the following case is provided.

A career counselor educator believes in preparing her students for using AI in their academic and future professional lives, but finds themselves anxious and unsure about the hows and whys of integrating AI into the career course classroom. The four step framework guides their actions:

1. The recommended first step is to explore and identify the specific educational goals for AI inclusion. Is the goal to examine AI use in navigating course research and materials using AI tools, or is AI inclusion and instruction centered on modeling integration of AI informed career exploration or preparation for job seeking, or something else?
2. The second task for the career counselor educator would be to map resources and barriers related to the identified goals. Figure 1 provides a sample map of possible AI integration barriers and resources educators may face.
3. Next, the career counselor educator would develop action strategies to meet identified aims informed by the awareness of barriers and resources. For example, following the identification of students as resources, the educator could plan a class session or presentation assignment that would elicit students' experiences and critiques of the AI tools they have used to explore careers or employment. This type of activity would foster discussions related to the AI related goals and could expand understanding of concerns and inquiries that could be raised within career counseling.
4. Following the implementation of a class plan the career counselor educator would monitor progress and adapt the plan based on levels of goal achievement and student feedback. 

Figure 1

Barrier and Resource Review Diagram

Reader Challenge

What thoughts, concerns, resources or barriers do you experience within your teaching environments regarding AI implementation? We encourage you to refer to the NCDA AI overview and resource page and create your own map of aims, resources, and barriers and reflect on the following questions:

1. What are my primary aims for implementation?
2. Who and/or what best serves as my resources?
3. What are the barriers and how do I experience them?
4. Given all of the above, what is one small, achievable step that I can take towards identified aims?

Conclusion and Takeaways

Artificial Intelligence conversations are ever present in today’s academic and career environments. Given the classroom forum, career counselor educators are in a position to facilitate important discussions and promote ethical use of AI related to career counseling experiences.  Determining specific aims for AI education, examining perceived barriers and resources, then strategizing, implementing, and monitoring progress of action plans, can assist educators manage this potentially unwieldy ever-evolving topic.

References

Akkurt, M., Maurya, R., & Brown, T. (2025). Learning through simulation: Counselor trainees’ interactions with ChatGPT as a client. Behavioral Sciences, 15(12), 1660. https://doi.org/10.3390/bs15121660 

Gonzalez Jr, L., & McCalla, D. (2025). Counselor-in-training perceptions of artificial intelligence: Implications for counselor education. Journal of Counselor Preparation and Supervision,19(3), 1-14. http://dx.doi.org/10.70013/qmr6nxlt 

Hirschi, A. (2020).  Whole-life career management: A counseling intervention framework. The Career Development Quarterly, 68(1), 2-17. https://doi.org/10.1002/cdq.12209 

National Career Development Association. (n.d.). Artificial intelligence resources. Retrieved June 15, 2026, from https://ncda.org/aws/NCDA/pt/sp/ai-resources 

Rudolph, E., Seer, H., Mothes, C., & Albrecht, J. (2024, September). Automated feedback generation in an intelligent tutoring system for counselor education.  Proceedings of the 19th Conference on Computer Science and Intelligence Systems (FedCSIS), 39,  501–512. https://doi.org/10.15439/2024F1649 

Shoemaker, S., Freeburg, N., Duquette, K. (2025). Artificial intelligence in counselor education: Innovative strategies for teaching, supervision, and clinical training. Journal of Counselor Preparation and Supervision, 19(3), 1-34. http://dx.doi.org/10.70013/d7634w16 

Tian, X., Liu, Y., Li Zhang, K., Litt, S., Shin, K., & Jiang, T. (2026). Do artificial intelligence clients speak like human clients? Exploring GPT‐4's content‐level performance in counseling role‐play. Journal of Counseling & Development, 104(1), 14-26. https://doi.org/10.1002/jcad.70016 

Yang, W., Xie, Y., & Wu, X. (2026). Can AI be a good counselor? Comparing the effectiveness of AI and human career counseling. Technology in Society, 103301. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techsoc.2026.103301 

Dr. Hongshan Shao is an assistant professor of counseling at California State University, Northridge. She is a National Certified Counselor and Certified Career Counselor. Her research interests include career counseling and development with international students/Asian populations; cross-cultural training, counseling, and supervision; multicultural and social justice advocacy. Hongshan can be reached at hongshan.shao@csun.edu.

Dr. Barbara Parker-Bell, PsyD ATR-BC, is Professor Emerita of Art Therapy at Florida State University and serves as Research Partner at the Career Research Center at FSU.  She is the co-author of Art Therapy and Career Counseling: Creative Strategies for Career Development Across the Lifespan, published by Routledge. She can be reached at bparkerbell@fsu.edu