Individual vs. group supervision: Both individual and group supervision count toward your professional obligations, and both are genuinely valuable — they just offer different things. If you’re deciding between them, or wondering whether to add one alongside the other, here’s how they differ in practice.
Individual supervision
One-to-one supervision is entirely about your caseload, at your pace. You set the agenda each session, and your supervisor can go as deep as a case need, without competing for time. It tends to suit counsellors who want focused attention on specific clients, who are working through something they’d rather not unpack in a group setting, or who are earlier in their career and want more direct guidance.
Group supervision
Group supervision brings several counsellors together — usually with a structured set of ground rules around confidentiality and how the group runs — to discuss cases and learn from each other, not just from the supervisor. You get a wider range of perspectives on any given case than one supervisor alone can offer, and it’s often a valuable source of peer connection, particularly if you work solo in private practice and don’t have colleagues down the hall.
Because time is shared across the group, individual airtime per session is naturally more limited than in a one-to-one session — which is part of why some counsellors use group supervision alongside individual sessions, rather than as a full replacement.
What to check before choosing
- Hours and ratios — both formats generally count toward your association’s supervision-hours requirement but confirm the specifics (including any maximum group size for hours to count) directly with ACA, PACFA, or your relevant body, since this can vary.
- Cost per session — group supervision is typically more cost-effective per person than individual sessions, simply because the cost of the supervisor’s time is shared.
- What you want out of it — deep, personalised attention (individual) versus breadth of perspective and peer learning (group).
- Your comfort discussing cases in front of others — group supervision requires a level of trust in the group’s confidentiality, which is exactly why a clear group agreement matters.
You don’t have to choose just one
Plenty of counsellors do both — individual sessions for the cases that need dedicated time, and group sessions for the peer learning and broader perspective. If you’re building a private practice, that combination can also help offset the relative isolation of working solo, while still giving you focused space for the cases that need it.
Getting started
I offer both individual and group supervision, face-to-face on the Sunshine Coast or online via Zoom and Teams. If you’re not sure which would suit you, that’s a perfectly reasonable thing to raise in an initial conversation — get in touch, and we’ll talk it through.
You can contact me here, or fill in the supervision enquiry form below.