What can students do with a BS or BA in psychology?
That's the question answered by a comprehensive new guide from APA's Div. 2 (Society for the Teaching of Psychology). The Online Career-Exploration Resource for Psychology Majors is a free, downloadable directory of hundreds of careers for which psychology majors can prepare, and contains more than 2,000 hotlinks to websites, videos, interviews and e-book chapters that define and explain each career.
The resource also offers a section for faculty that explains how best to use it and provides extensive lists of both online and printed sources of career-advising information.
The man behind the guide is Drew Appleby, PhD, professor emeritus of psychology at Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis, who says that many psychology programs don't provide sufficient career-planning information to students, because faculty may be unaware of the careers their students can enter or assume their students are getting such information elsewhere.
Research backs up that belief: A national survey of psychology department majors published in 2015 in Teaching of Psychology found that psychology departments often don't talk about career development with their students.
As an advisor and mentor throughout his 40-year career, Appleby found that many students are too narrow in their career choices and may not realize that the skills they learn in both their psychology and general education courses can help them enter and succeed at many jobs.
"Knowing Freud's theory of personality probably won't land you a job after you graduate, but the ability to write and speak clearly and persuasively will," says Appleby. "Can you understand, apply, analyze and evaluate complex concepts? Can you work well with a group containing diverse people?"
Of the 280 careers in the guide, 224 do not require a graduate degree because only about 20 percent to 25 percent of the more than 100,000 students who earn a bachelor's degree in psychology each year go on to graduate school — and not necessarily in psychology.
With its jobs grouped into 15 broad occupational categories, such as human resources, education, technology and the military, the resource clearly shows that a psychology degree goes far beyond training therapists. In fact, the psychology degree is among the most broadly applicable to today's job market, says Ruth Ault, PhD, professor emerita of psychology at Davidson College, who edits the teaching resources section on Div. 2's website.
"There are so many careers listed, a student would be hard-pressed to find something that doesn't involve psychology," she says.
Find the student resource at www.teachpsych.org/Resources/Documents/otrp/resources/appleby15students.docxopens in new window and the faculty resource at www.teachpsych.org/Resources/Documents/otrp/resources/appleby15faculty.docxopens in new window.
