Applications: Employment Counsellor's Assistant

Applications: The Employment Counsellor's Assistant

A knowledge-based decision support system to help employment counsellors.

The Problem

Human Resources Development Canada (HRDC) provides employment counselling services across Canada through its employment centres. Employment counselling involves assessment of the client's employment situation and development of strategies to attain goals related to increasing the client's employability. In client-centered counselling, this is done by the counsellor and client working together. Counsellors draw on their counselling training, federal guidelines, policy and many support programs to assist the client and document the process. The challenge for this project was: How can employment counselling services be provided more effectively, for more people, by the same number of counsellors?

The Solution

HRDC-NHQ arranged for employment counsellors from various regions of Canada to work with a knowledge base development team from Acquired Intelligence to build the Employment Counsellor's Assistant (ECA). The team used Acquire^® to represent the reasoning underlying employment counselling and ToolBook to build the interface for counsellors to use. This integrated software application supports employment counsellors through the first ten steps of the Assessment Component of Employment Counselling.

The ECA documents a client's file through the assessment process and makes suggestions for both assessment and intervention. The human aspect of the client-counsellor relationship is left to the counsellor and the client, but the ECA helps by providing reminders about available alternatives and tracking progress to ensure that all steps are properly completed and mistakes are avoided. The Assessment Screen shows the ten counselling steps supported by the ECA. While processing a client's case, each step is marked when it is properly completed. Five steps are mandatory, and these are marked in the example.

Reasoning begins when Challenges are identified for the client. Challenges can lead to Constraints, or barriers, that block resolution of the client's employability problem. After reviewing the indicators, the counsellor can accept or reject the suggested constraints, select others known to the system, or name new ones which s/he and the client feel are applicable (i.e., the ECA is open-ended). Constraints lead to Contingencies and then to Goals and Options, which set Tasks, if the client agrees, to achieve the goals. The set of Goals, and Tasks to achieve them, constitute an Action Plan for the client. Information is tracked about each task, when it is to be achieved, its progress, and results.

Additional Aids for the Counsellor

Extensive on-line help and Counselling Guidelines provide background and advice on how to handle many counselling problems. On-line tools are provided for the counsellor and the client to work on particular problems (e.g., the Balance-Sheet helps teach decision-making strategies). Forms can be printed as worksheets for clients to work with on their own time and administrative forms can be automatically completed. Databases of referral services and community resources are provided and can be tailored to include local entries. Case-Based Reasoning can retrieve similar cases. The ECA can also be run in automatic mode; i.e., the steps are presented in the appropriate sequence under Acquire^® control. Finally, a complete tracing and analysis of the underlying reasoning is available, along with a processing history of the client's case.

More Information

Intelligent Business Applications: Customer Services in PC/AI Magazine (March/April 1996, Volume 10, Issue 2).