Comprehensive Guide to Careers in Psychology and Their Roles

the focus of this lecture is going to be on careers in psychology so let's start by talking about what a

psychologist is and what a psychologist is not so a psychologist is someone who has

earned a PhD in a particular area of psychology so for example I've mentioned previously that I'm a social personality

psychologist so I have a PHD in social personality psychology I also have a minor in quantitative issues so I do

statistical work as well in contrast to a psychologist a psychiatrist has a medical degree it has

specialized training in the diagnosis and treatment of mental disorders so for example there are clinical psychologists

who also work in the diagnosis and treatment of mental disorders but they didn't go to medical school rather they

went to graduate school to focus on having a career in Clinical Psychology in contrast a psychiatrist went to

medical school and they specialized in the treatment of mental disorder so there's a distinction in the type of

degree they're both doctors but different types of doctors right so a psychologist has a PHD a psychiatrist

has an MD in contrast to both psychologist and psychiatrists a psychoanalyst has either

a PhD or an MD but the primary thing for a psychoanalyst is that they've received specialized training in psychoanalytic

methods developed by Sigmund Freud and so when you if you or someone you know has gone to a therapist it's possible

that person could be a psychologist could be a psychiatrist could be a psychoanalyst could be something else

there are other types of therapists we'll talk about soon but a psychologist is going to be our

our primary focus uh for for this course and I just want to make sure that there wasn't any confusion about what a

psychologist is and what a psychiatrist or psychoanalyst are since those uh are terms that are commonly kind of tossed

around in society without sometimes being terribly correct about exactly what what it refers to

so just to give you an eye about some of the careers in Psychology many of the careers within psychology

require an advanced degree either a PhD or a master's degree now there are certainly some bachelor's level

positions but many jobs within psychology require a PhD or master's degree

some of the career options certainly not all of them some of them involve things like teaching so for example I'm a

professor here at Oakland University I teach courses like this one my primary job is actually in research which is the

second Focus so researchers are doing experimental work or doing some sort of research to advance knowledge in some

area so for example I spend most of my time doing research and I also teach courses

like this one their clinical psychologists who work in different areas and we'll talk a bit more about

Clinical Psychology soon their counseling psychologists there are a number of distinctions between clinical

psychologists and counseling psychologists the two areas are beginning to blur together more and more

over the years in fact there are actually some programs now that are clinical slash counseling programs which

make the distinction even fuzzier in some ways but clinical psychologist is a general rule of thumb tend to tend to

focus on more severe forms of psychopathology in contrast counseling psychologists

tend to deal more with everyday problems of adjustment but there's a lot of gray or gray area or areas in between where

certain issues could be dealt with by either a clinical psychologist or counseling psychologist and it certainly

is in the case of clinical psychologists never deal with everyday problems of adjustment or that counseling

psychologists never deal with more severe forms of psychopathology it's just that the two areas have become

uh the distinctions have become greater over the years there's also social work you can do

therapy with a master's in social work in some states assuming you pass licensure requirements uh social work we

typically think of social workers as Bachelor or Master's level individuals who typically are helping connect people

with resources in their communities however in some masters programs in Social Work social workers receive

training to provide individual therapeutic services as well as group therapy as well and so that's another

possibility for someone with an interest or background in psychology there are also a number of jobs in

corporate and marketing sectors uh for example a lot of times uh people with a with a job in marketing may have a

background in Psychology or at least a strong interest in Psychology there are people who do data analyst work in

various fields and some of my graduate students have gone to work in in advertising for Health Care automotive

industry uh doing different sorts of research and statistical analysis so a variety of different sorts of positions

also I have an image here on this slide someone receiving their doctoral degree doctoral degrees typically are are

conferred informal ceremonies that involve a special attire and rights when my uh students when my doctoral students

graduate when they receive their phds I have to put on my formal robes and attire and I attend a ceremony where we

put a hood on them like you can see the gentleman in the image is giving his doc natural Hood placed on him during the

ceremony so where do psychologists work you can see from this graph that about a quarter

or more of psychologists work for colleges and universities like myself a lot of us work in these sorts of

settings you can also see that another large chunk of psychologists work in private practice so a lot of clinical

and counseling psychologists work in private practice people may work in Hospital and Clinics about a little less

than 20 percent of them when I finish my Master's Degree my Master's was in Clinical Psychology and I worked as a

therapist for a Community Mental Health Center so for a little while I would have fallen into that 20 percent or so

of people working for clinics I then went back to graduate school and got my PHD in social personality and have been

working in in University settings since then my first job after getting my PhD was at the University of Southern

Mississippi where I worked for seven years for coming to Oakland in 2011 and I've been here since that time so I've

spent most of my career in universities you also see a psychologist working in places like business and government

about six percent of folks work in those sorts of Institutions uh Elementary and secondary schools about four percent and

other about nine percent um like I mentioned earlier a lot of my graduate students have gone to work in

the private sector working for things like uh like software companies or automotive industry or Healthcare Banks

um where they're typically doing research and statistical analyzes some of the primary areas of Applied

work within psychology they're really going to be four areas of Applied psychology the first is going to be

clinical psychologists which we've already mentioned but we'll just give a little more background on what Clinical

Psychology is so clinical psychologists are concerned with the evaluation diagnosis and treatment of individuals

with different forms of psychological disorders as well as treatment of less severe behavioral and emotional problems

um so things like they do things like interview clients they do psychological testing and they provide both group as

well as individual psychotherapy Counseling psychology is going to be our second applied area of psychology

counseling overlaps with Clinical Psychology as we were just talking about and part of the overlap is that they're

going to be doing similar sorts of activities they're going to be doing interviewing testing providing therapy

however counseling psychologists usually are dealing with folks who are suffering

more from everyday problems of adjustment or of moderate severity so for example they tend to specialize in

things like family counseling marital counseling and career Counseling in contrast to more severe forms of psycho

Psychopathology like our study by clinical psychologists the third applied area of psychology is

going to be an educational or School settings so educational psychologists work to improve curriculum design

achievement testing teacher training and other aspects of the educational process School psychologists are usually going

to be working in elementary or secondary schools but they can work in other types of school settings as well they're often

going to be involved in testing and counseling children who are having some problems in school and also helping

parents and teachers solve the school-related sorts of issues for their children

the final area of Applied psychology is going to be industrial and organizational psychology

psychologists in this area are going to perform a number of tasks that are going to be relevant to business and industry

so things like running a human resource departments uh working to improve ration the the morale and attitudes of Staff

working to improve job satisfaction and productivity of employees looking at organizational structures and procedures

and trying to streamline and fine-tune things so that organizations are working in a way that make a little more sense

and they're going to be making recommendations for improvements kind of across the board and different sorts of

uh workplace settings