For the first three years of her basic research postdoctoral fellowship at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, Debra Bangasser, PhD, was excited. By year four, she was starting to feel anxious about whether her search for a permanent job would ever pay off.
"I started to worry about what the next step was going to be," she says. "You start to wonder if you're ever going to move on."
It wasn't until after her fifth year as a postdoc that Bangasser got a job as an assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience at Temple University.
That kind of prolonged postdoctoral experience is typical for many new psychologists in the basic and applied research track and just one of the challenges psychology trainees face as they navigate the period between entering graduate school and getting their first jobs. Other problems include a scarcity of teaching positions as well as the continued shortage of internships for health service and other applied psychology trainees, with 801 students left unmatched after the first round of the Association of Psychology Postdoctoral and Internship Centers match process this year.
Helping to find solutions to these and other challenges is why APA President Nadine J. Kaslow, PhD, has made this transition period one of her presidential priorities. In September, APA hosted the "Opening Doors Summit: Facilitating Transitions from Doctoral Education to First Job," which brought together experts to talk about the barriers that slow students' progress through the doctoral and postdoctoral pipeline and to explore possible solutions.
"We have a responsibility as a profession to think about how we can make life easier for our trainees and our junior colleagues," says Kaslow, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Emory University School of Medicine.
Any solutions should address the clinical and science sides together, adds Kaslow. High levels of student debt, for example, limit the types of jobs both kinds of students can take.
"There are actually so many similarities between the challenges on the health services side and the scientific side," she says. "If we work together to think through these things, we will be much stronger and more united as a discipline."
While the group has yet to finalize its recommendations, several possible solutions emerged from the discussions at the summit:
Increase transparency. All psychology programs need to let students know what they're getting into, says summit co-chair Stephen McCutcheon, PhD, who directs internship and fellowship training at the VA Puget Sound Healthcare System in Seattle. Clinical doctoral programs must release information about funding, length of time to completion, drop-out rates and other variables to be APA accredited. But there's no such requirement for social, development and other nonclinical programs. Making that kind of information available to all psychology students would allow students to make better-informed decisions about graduate school and understand what they should expect, says McCutcheon.
Enhance mentoring. "We mentor as we were mentored, just as we parent as we were parented," says summit participant Jim Diaz-Granados, PhD, executive director of APA's Education Directorate. But that doesn't mean that way of mentoring is best, he says. More and better mentoring could help students make their way through graduate school and the training-to-job transition, he says. As a result, summit participants called for developing a set of mentoring best practices that could be posted on the APA Education Directorate website. It would also be helpful to pull together job search resources from reliable sources and make them available on the website, added Bangasser. "There are resources already on the Web that people turn to, but they haven't necessarily been vetted," she says.
Publicize nontraditional career options. While gradPSYCH's "Odd Jobs" feature publicizes psychologists working in such settings as Google, NASA and Cirque du Soleil, more needs to be done to make students aware that they can apply the skills they've learned beyond clinical practice or academia. Students need to know more about how psychologists in nontraditional areas found their careers, says summit participant Candice Crowell, a member-at-large with an education focus on the American Psychological Association of Graduate Students Committee. Podcasts on APA's website and more articles in APA publications and outlets like Psychology Today are one possible strategy for bringing attention to psychologists with nontraditional careers. Also important are redefining success and reducing the stigma associated with nontraditional career paths. "In the past, the field has said success looks like a clinical or academic position," says Crowell, a University of Georgia counseling psychology student who's on internship at Emory's Counseling Center. "Now we're thinking, ‘Are graduates satisfied with their positions and using the skills they've spent five to 10 years training in? If so, that's a successful outcome.'"
Collect more workforce data. The summit participants are also working with APA's Center for Workforce Studies to identify data on emerging career trends and opportunities, says Catherine Grus, PhD, APA's deputy executive director for education. The hope, she says, is to gather data that can show students where psychologists' employment opportunities might be in the next five to 10 years. In addition, the summit participants want to examine the knowledge, skills and attitudes that are associated with students moving successfully through such key transitions as getting into graduate school, finding an internship, completing their degrees, landing a postdoc and finding a first job. "We could come up with some data-driven examples of what characteristics are associated with someone who's less likely to get hung up at these junctures," she says.
The next step is for the group to finalize its list of recommendations. While the Opening Doors initiative officially stops at year's end, Bangasser predicts that many participants will continue to advocate on the issue. "There's just such enthusiasm," she says.
Rebecca A. Clay is a journalist in Washington, D.C.
