What to Expect in Your First Counselling Placement

There is a particular kind of anticipation that comes with the approach of your first placement. You have spent a year in the classroom at PCI College, exploring theory, practising skills, sitting with yourself in ways that have sometimes been uncomfortable, sometimes revelatory. And then the moment arrives when all of that preparation turns toward something real: a room, a chair, and another person trusting you with what they carry. 

It is entirely normal to feel both excited and terrified. Most students do. This article is here to help you understand what the process looks like at PCI College, what you can expect from your placement experience, and how to make the most of it. Everything covered here follows on from decisions made before you even reach placement, when you first chose whether the Certificate or the BSc was the right starting point.

When Does Placement Begin? 

At PCI College, clinical placement begins in Year 2 of the BSc (Hons) in Counselling and Psychotherapy. The first year is an important foundation; you are building self-awareness, developing your skills, and engaging with the theoretical frameworks that will underpin your clinical work. By the time placement begins, you are not starting from scratch. You are bringing a year of serious training into the room with you. 

A member of PCI College’s dedicated Client Work Team will assist your placement at the appropriate time, working to ensure that you have access to clients in a suitable setting.  

What Does a Placement Setting Look Like? 

Placements are hosted by a range of partner organisations across Ireland, community-based services, voluntary sector agencies, and other organisations that provide or support mental health and wellbeing services. These are not simply administrative arrangements. They are genuine partnerships, carefully developed to create learning environments in which student counsellors can practise ethically and safely, with the support of both the host organisation and the college. 

You will not be dropped into a setting and left to figure it out alone. Placement partners understand that they are hosting student therapists in professional training. The expectation is that the setting offers appropriate oversight and a safe environment for both client and counsellor. 

The types of settings can vary, from community counselling services to organisations supporting people through bereavement, addiction, domestic violence, or general mental health difficulties. Each setting brings its own client population, culture, and challenges. Part of what makes placement so formative is precisely this: you encounter the real diversity of human experience in ways that no classroom exercise can fully replicate. 

How Many Hours Do You Need? 

Over the course of the BSc programme, students are required to complete 120 hours of client work at their approved PCI College placement. These are direct client-facing hours, time spent in the room, doing the work. 

This is a meaningful commitment, and it is designed to be. The hours are not a box to tick; they are the foundation of clinical competence. Alongside your academic study, your personal therapy, and your supervision, these hours form the core of your development as a practitioner. 

Supervision: Your Clinical Safety Net 

Before you see your first client, you will need to have your supervision arrangements in place, and your contract signed and returned to client work. Supervision is not optional, it is a professional and ethical requirement, and one of the most important supports you will have throughout your placement. 

As a BSc student, you are required to complete 24 hours of individual supervision with an IACP, BACP, or IAHIP-accredited supervisor. Additionally in Years 3 and 4, you will also receive 32 hours of group supervision delivered in-house by PCI College. 

Supervision is the space where you process what happens in the room, where you bring your uncertainties, your blind spots, your countertransference, and the material that stays with you between sessions. A good supervisor does not tell you what to do; they help you think more clearly about what is already happening. Many students find that supervision becomes one of the most valuable parts of their training. The relationship you build with your placement supervisor often becomes one of the most formative of your entire training.

Please note that the cost of individual supervision is separate from your course fees. Supervision rates are typically in the region of €60 per session and are agreed directly between you and your supervisor. 

Personal Therapy: The Work You Do on Yourself 

Running alongside your placement, you are also required to complete 50 hours of personal therapy with an IACP, BACP, or IAHIP accredited therapist, again, separate from and in addition to your course fees. 

This is not incidental. At PCI College, the belief that self-awareness is foundational to good clinical practice is not a slogan; it is built into the structure of the training. You cannot ask clients to go where you are not willing to go yourself. Personal therapy is where you deepen that willingness. 

It is also where you experience the process from the inside. You will understand the therapeutic relationship differently, more viscerally, more humbly, once you have been a client yourself. 

Garda Vetting: An Early Priority 

All students on the BSc programme are required to complete Garda Vetting before commencing placement. This is a statutory requirement related to working with vulnerable populations, and it is one to organise early. The vetting process incurs a small administrative fee (€20), Which is a separate charge but included in course fees. 

Do not leave this until the last moment. Garda Vetting has processing timelines that are outside anyone’s control, and delays can affect when you are able to begin seeing clients. The PCI College team will guide you through the process, but the sooner it is initiated, the better. 

IACP Student Membership 

As a BSc student at PCI College, you are required to register as a Student Member of the IACP (Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy). This connects you from the beginning of your training to the professional body that sets the standards for counselling practice in Ireland. 

Student membership is more than a formality. It keeps you informed of developments in the field, provides access to professional resources, and starts you on the path toward the full professional accreditation you will work toward on graduation. 

What Will the First Session Actually Feel Like? 

Honestly? Probably nerve-wracking. And that is alright. 

Most students report that the first session with a real client feels both more ordinary and more significant than they expected. More ordinary, because the skills you have been practising, active listening, reflection, and unconditional positive regard, do not disappear under pressure. They are there. You have worked hard to put them there. More significantly, because sitting with a real person in real distress makes the purpose of everything you have been doing suddenly vivid and concrete. 

You may feel that you do not know enough. This is almost universal. The important thing to understand is that you are not expected to know everything, you are expected to be present, to listen, and to hold the space with care and ethical awareness. Your clients are not expecting a finished practitioner. They are working with a student counsellor in a supervised setting, and that context is transparent and appropriate. 

What you bring to that first session is more than you think: a year of personal development, a year of skills practice, a theoretical grounding in how and why people struggle, and the support of your supervisor, your lecturers, and your peers. 

The Moments That Stay With You 

Placement has a way of changing you, and not always in the ways you anticipate. 

Students often speak of being moved by the resilience of the people they work with, by the courage it takes to walk into a room and talk about the things that have been hardest. They speak of discovering, perhaps for the first time, what it means to be genuinely present for another person. They speak of the sessions that stayed with them long afterwards, in the way that things stay with you when they matter. 

They also speak of the sessions that felt clunky, or incomplete, or where they said the wrong thing and spent the following week worrying about it. That, too, is part of it. Placement teaches you in ways that classrooms cannot, precisely because the stakes are real and the learning has texture. 

What PCI College’s structure offers you, the supervision, the personal therapy, the group reflection, the support of the Client Work Team, is not a guarantee against discomfort. It is something better: a container strong enough to hold you while you grow into the work. 

A Word on Being Patient With Yourself 

The students who struggle most on placement are often those with the highest standards. They want to be excellent from the beginning. They compare their internal experience, anxious, uncertain, perpetually second-guessing, with what they imagine competence should look like. 

Here is what experienced practitioners will tell you: the uncertainty does not entirely go away. What changes is your relationship to it. You learn to work alongside it, to use it as information rather than evidence of inadequacy. You learn that sitting with not-knowing, without rushing to fix or resolve, is itself a clinical skill, one of the most important ones. 

Your first placement is not the endpoint of your training. It is the beginning of a different kind of learning: the kind that only happens in relationship with real human beings, in real rooms, doing the real work. 

Ready to take the next step in your training? Find out more about the [BSc (Hons) in Counselling and Psychotherapy](https://www.pcicollege.ie/course/bsc-counselling-psychotherapy/) at PCI College, or speak to our team on +353 (0)1 464 2268 or at enquiries@pcicollege.ie.