School Counselor job description
1,038 verified openings in Behavioral & Mental Health
Guidance offices, college advising centers, and admissions departments all hire out of one occupation. BLS counted 353,310 educational, guidance, and career counselors and advisors nationally and put median pay at $64,330 in May 2025; a tenth of them earned under $45,020 and a tenth earned over $104,770. O*NET's description of the work is short: advise and assist students, and provide educational and vocational guidance. The setting is a school or a campus rather than a clinic.
Core Duties and Responsibilities
Record keeping outranks every other task on O*NET's list, which is ordered by the importance respondents themselves gave it. Student files have to be accurate and complete to the standard set by state law and district policy. Advising comes next: course and program selection, scheduling and registration, school adjustment, truancy, study habits, and career planning, plus crisis intervention when something goes wrong on campus. Counselors also read transcripts against graduation and college entrance requirements, write letters of recommendation, use tests and interviews to gauge a student's aptitudes and interests, and refer students to outside counseling when the need runs past what the school can offer.
Common Skills and Technologies
Listening comes first, then speaking, then social perceptiveness, which is O*NET's term for reading what a student is not saying. After that comes the reading and writing the record keeping demands. There is no clinical suite here. Employers ask by name for student information systems, and the fuller tool list runs to Microsoft Access, SharePoint, Project, and Oracle PeopleSoft; everything else is the Office suite.
Education, Training, and Career Path
Graduate school is the assumption here, since O*NET puts the work in its top preparation band, Job Zone Five. The credentials people reported are more mixed. About 56 percent named a bachelor's degree and 41 percent a master's, and almost no one reported less than that. The split reflects the college advising and admissions jobs the code covers alongside K-12 school counseling. Job titles respondents report include academic advisor, admissions counselor, career counselor, guidance counselor, and student services coordinator.
Sources: O*NET 30.0, 21-1012.00 Educational, Guidance, and Career Counselors and Advisors, https://www.onetonline.org/link/summary/21-1012.00. BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025, 21-1012, https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes211012.htm.