Whether you are new to professional counselling or want to safeguard your career with an industry-recognised qualification, UNE's Graduate Diploma in Counselling gives you real-world skills and knowledge, underpinned by a strong philosophical framework. Our course equips you to support and empower people, building relationships and fostering personal growth in a diverse range of contexts. With flexible delivery, our accredited course integrates theory with skills-based practical experience and supervision to allow you to practice in this dynamic, person-centred field.

Why study the Graduate Diploma in Counselling with UNE?
At UNE, we have a long history of training university-qualified counsellors. Our Graduate Diploma in Counselling provides professional training that prepares you for work in a diverse range of counselling contexts. Our course is underpinned by Humanistic and Existential counselling philosophies, which deal with questions of meaning and freedom, grapple with what it means to be human, and emphasise the value of individual and collective agency.

Whether you are new to counselling or you have existing professional experience and wish to pursue a formal counselling qualification, our course allows you to future proof your career with an industry-recognised qualification while enabling you to meet your work and family commitments.

This course also provides a direct pathway to the Master of Counselling at UNE, if you wish to pursue further study.

UNE is proud to be an industry leader in the provision of online learning. In fact, we're Australia's longest continuous provider of distance (now online) education.

What makes our course different?
Our Graduate Diploma in Counselling focuses on providing you with industry-valued skills and an in-depth understanding of real-world counselling processes. Our approach to counselling is founded on connecting with others and exploring what emerges when we make these connections. You might find that the learning experience in this course is different to what you have experienced previously – your development as an independent, self-directed and reflexive thinker requires a degree of emotional and psychological agility. We aim to support you to engage with your colleagues, teachers and clients in order to assist with your development of genuineness, acceptance, caring, compassion and empathy.

Our goal is to provide a growth-promoting learning environment that mirrors what you will provide for your clients in practice, alongside opportunities to:

• Learn with passionate and experienced academics and practitioners and equip yourself with the practical knowledge and skills required to thrive in a rapidly changing workplace. Our combination of online learning and mandatory intensive schools means that you can integrate theoretical learning with skills-based practice, academic support and clinical supervision.
• Choose a pathway to follow, with options for the Generalist Counselling Pathway, the Mental Health Practice Pathway or the Counselling Placement Pathway which includes 40 hours of face-to-face counselling, 10 hours of clinical supervision and 150 hours of agency-based activities.
• Study flexibly — we know that you need to balance study with your existing commitments. Our course is flexibly delivered to help you balance your workload, with options to study units across UNE's trimesters, allowing you to tailor your program of study to your individual needs.*

* Please note: to meet the accreditation requirements of the Australian Counselling Association, the minimum time in which you can complete this course is two years.

Study online
Most of our students choose to study online across three study periods with 24/7 tutor support* and fit study around work and family commitments. Uniquely, our online students are mostly over 30 and bring valuable experience with them. They form a community of adults juggling the same challenges and priorities and who bring their life and work experience together at UNE in order to become future-fit and better respond to a rapidly changing world.

* 24/7 tutor support includes: essay feedback (within 24 hours); live chat 24/7 for generic feedback on academic writing; and subject-specific help at a foundation or first-year level for subjects including mathematics, chemistry, biology, physics, business, accounting, microeconomics, macroeconomics and statistics. There are also a wide range of workshops, resources and courses available in academic skills support to assist you and help you to succeed.