Pro­fes­sional Guid­ance Coun­sel­lor Edu­ca­tion

For eligibility, you must have a teacher’s pedagogical qualification that is recognised in Finland. This can be obtained through two options:

• You have obtained the qualifications in Finland, for example in our International Professional Teacher Education programme,
  or
• You have a decision from the Finnish National Agency for Education that recognises your foreign qualification to be equivalent to Finnish qualifications.

If you have a decision from the Finnish National Agency for Education that requires you to complete supplementary studies, you need to complete the supplementary studies before you can be eligible for the Professional Guidance Counsellor Education. You can complete the supplementary studies in our International Professional Teacher Education.

If your foreign qualification is fully recognised, you can directly apply for our programme.

The eligibility criteria must be met by the end of the application period. If you apply in the 2025 admission period, the eligibility criteria must be met by 22 January 2025.

To determine the eligibility, it is relevant to know what subjects are taught as vocational subjects and what are taught as general subjects in vocational education in Finland. Also, the field of education in which you have completed your higher education degree affects the criteria.

If your field is taught as a vocational subject in Finnish vocational education, you need professional work experience for eligibility. If you have completed Professional Teacher Education in Finland, the work experience has been checked when you applied for the teacher’s pedagogical studies.

If you are a general subjects and common units teacher, you can be eligible to apply when you have a master’s degree and have completed your teacher’s pedagogical qualification.

If you are teaching biology and/or geography, you are considered a teacher of vocational units as these subjects are taught as vocational units in FInland’s vocational education system. In this case, you would need 3 years of professional work experience along with a higher education degree. The required work experience should be other than teaching experience.

The number of applicants vary each year, which can affect the score thresholds. There are also occasional changes made to the admission criteria, meaning the score thresholds from previous years are not entirely comparable. Therefore, it is recommended to apply for the programme to receive confirmed information about your application score. If you do not get a study place, it will be easier to plan what you need to do to secure a place the following year.

Yes, you can. Experience in guidance counselling provides application points, but this is only part of the scoring, and the admission is based on the total points. Each year, about half of the students have no prior experience in guidance counselling, or they have accumulated less than three months of experience.

Experience as a group leader, class teacher or tutor teacher is not regarded as study counselling work for this purpose. Only working in the role of a guidance counsellor is considered relevant experience. The role of a guidance counsellor is more broadly defined as engaging in various counselling tasks, and this must be described in the work certificate.

Once you have submitted your application, you should receive a confirmation email. This email will contain a link that allows you to make changes to your application during the application period. If you used your Finnish ID credentials to log in to the Studyinfo portal (My Studyinfo), you can also modify your application by logging in and accessing your application there. You can modify your attachments up until 29 January 2025 at 15:00 (EET).

Unfortunately, you can’t. The waiting list is for those who have not received any study places.