Browsing by Subject "Studiehandledare"

At the time of conducting this study, the Finnish upper secondary schools were facing a major change in the school system. Universities were changing their admission system, and a reform in upper secondary education resulted in a new curriculum for the school year 2021, five years after the current curriculum was put into use in 2016. Guidance counseling has gained a more prominent role in the curriculum and individual counseling and development has become increasingly emphasized. The proportion of upper secondary school teachers who often experience stress has risen from 14% to 17% between 2017 and 2019, and previous research indicates that guidance counselors are at risk of burnout. Stressors have been discovered to be lack of timely resources, lack of role clarity and a large workload. The purpose of this study is to investigate the Finnish guidance counselors’ well-being at work, and how they experience their workload. This is explored on the basis of the variables job satisfaction, satisfaction regarding job duties, social support, time resources, access to further training, experienced challenge and experienced stress. The data was collected with an electronic questionnaire sent out to the guidance counselors in Swedish speaking upper secondary schools in Finland, a total of N = 42. The questionnaire was answered by a total of N = 22, all of which were analyzed in the study. The program IBM SPSS 25 was used in the processing and analysis of the data. All group comparisons are performed with nonparametric tests: Mann-Whitney U-test, Kruskal-Wallis test by ranks and Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient. The results showed that the guidance counsellors generally experienced a high level of job satisfaction. Symptoms of stress or perceived burnout had a negative correlation with several factors: job satisfaction, perceived social support, timely resources at hand, and a higher experience of stress and challenge. Work experience was also significant for job satisfaction. Despite this, the guidance counselors with experiences of stress or burnout reported a high job satisfaction.