Multicultural & social justice counseling competencies

Picture the exam handing you a stem that ends, "What should the culturally competent counselor do FIRST?" Nine times out of ten, the keyed answer is some version of look inward first — and that is no accident. It comes straight from the tripartite model that anchors this entire domain.

Sue, Arredondo, and McDavis gave the profession its backbone with three dimensions of competence: Awareness, Knowledge, and Skills — memorized in that order. Awareness is the counselor's insight into their own cultural values, biases, assumptions, and privilege. Knowledge is understanding the worldview of the culturally different client — their history, values, and experience of oppression. Skills are the culturally responsive interventions and techniques you actually deploy. The tested sequence is deliberate: self-awareness is the foundation, because you cannot understand another worldview or intervene appropriately until you have examined your own lens.

In 2015 Ratts and colleagues published the Multicultural and Social Justice Counseling Competencies (MSJCC), endorsed by ACA/AMCD as the update to the 1992 competencies. The MSJCC keeps the awareness–knowledge–skills scaffolding but adds a fourth developmental domain — Action (Awareness, Knowledge, Skills, and Action) — pushing counselors beyond the office into advocacy and social justice. Its signature image is a set of nested circles built on the privileged–marginalized status of both counselor and client, arranged across four quadrants (privileged counselor–marginalized client, and so on). It also names layers of intervention that scale outward: intrapersonal, interpersonal, institutional, community, public policy, and international/global.

Why examiners love this: it converts a vague ideal ("be culturally sensitive") into a testable structure with a fixed order and a memorable extension. Expect items asking which dimension a described behavior illustrates, or which comes first.

Clinical Pearl: The order is the answer — Awareness → Knowledge → Skills (→ Action). When a question asks what the culturally competent counselor does first, choose self-examination of one's own biases and privilege before learning about, or intervening with, the client.