Rock Climbing in the Ozarks

Just back from a relaxing weekend rock-climbing in the northern Ozarks with my family I am reminded of how fortunate we are to live in the USA. I'm doubly mindful of how blessed we are to do what we do, to be able to help people doing something we truly love doing.

Watching the men in my family climb those rocks reminded me that everything we do, even those things we love doing, hold perils that we have to plan for, including our beloved counseling profession. It's not enough to learn to help our clients we have to learn how to safely run our practice or it's very possible we won't be around to help anyone if we don't. I'm not trying to peddle fear, I've just been there and know that the threat exists and it's very real.

To help you achieve your "safe practice" we're staging a workshop on Friday Oct. 23rd called, "Chapter 611-Release of Records and Professional Practice Forms". This is not the only "risk-trap" in your practice but it's a whopper. One can only ride the luck-wagon for so long before the odds catch up with you so please consider taking this workshop with us, meet some new friends, diminish your risk of complaints (or worse) from the mishandling of record requests, and get 7 CE credits for your trouble.

Now, last week I wrote about our meeting with BHEC's Executive Director Darrel Spinks and his reply to our question about what we as counselors could do to help him achieve his goals for us. This week I'd like to share some research that Phillip put together about Supervisors and Intern-Associates in the State of TX.

As you should know by now our goal here at PracticeMentors.us is to educate counselors at all levels about the pitfalls of our profession and how to best mitigate that risk. A big piece of that picture is the Supervisor-Associate relationship and raising the bar on the level of education an associate receives during that relationship.

Supervisor-Associate Ratios, Oh My!

Recently Phillip handed me a report of some research he'd been doing on supervisors and associates and some of the numbers were both surprising and a bit disturbing.

Seems there are 5011 LPC supervisors in TX, not counting the inactive or out-of-state licensees.

Where are these supervisors? Glad you asked. According to the list I was given that geo-breakdown works out like this:

Dallas Area 21.6%
Ft Worth Area 9.4% (This surprised me a bit!)
Houston Area 19.1% (Dallas has more than Houston!?)
Austin Area 11.9%
San Antonio Area 11.0%

That means 73.1% of all actively licensed LPC Supervisors are located in these 5 metro areas which makes sense based on populations, of course.

Another 15.8% of the total list are spread out through the following secondary markets:

Waco-Killeen Area
Tyler/Longview/Marshall Area
Lubbock Area
El Paso Area
Bryan/College Station Area
Amarillo Area
Abilene Area
Beaumont Area
Nacagdoches/Lufkin Area
Midland-Odessa Area
San Angelo Area

That leaves a remainder list of about 11% that's thinly spread throughout TX in the counties not included in the metro areas above.

And then there are the associates (interns). As of this writing there are (4500) licensed individuals doing their best to accumulate their 3000 hours and there's a new crop of them every year.

Who's Doing The Heavy Lifting?

Doing the simple math, that averages out to about (0.8) associates per supervisor but of course we know things don't work that way. My partner tells me that according to, "Phillip's Law of Numbers That Make Sense", about 15-20% of the total group is supervising 70-80% of all of the associates.

50-60% of the total group of supervisors are supervising the remaining 20-30%.

The remaining 20% (probably a lot closer to 35-40%)of the licensed supervisors are supervising no one. Let's see how those numbers shake out.

That top 20% equals about 1000 licensed supervisors. If they're supervising (let's be conservative) 50% of all associates that's 2250 next-gen counselors. That averages out to 2.26 intern-associates per top 20% supervisor.

That leaves 2250 associates being supervised by that middle 60%, about 3000 supervisors. That teacher:student ratio works out to be just a bit over half a student per supervisor-mentor.

Since it's very difficult to supervise half an associate, what that probably tells us is that the bottom 20% that's mentoring no one is really a lot closer to 35-40%, as alluded to above.

What Does That Mean to Me As A Supervisor?

What it means is that 20% of all counselors are mentoring an average of 2-3 associates at any one time. That middle group is mentoring 1 associate if they can find them, and the bottom tier is just paying for a license and an, "S".

What do you do with this? Well, if you're a supervisor and you do it, not for the money but primarily to give back, then this tells you that competition among supervisors that are actively looking for associates is very high. The talented intern-associates are out there, looking for the best mentor they can find which means you need to up your game and keep it there, to attract them. And that means you need to check out, The Academy!

Plan Smart. Be Safe. Serve Others.

Kathleen Mills, LPC-S, CEAP