Finding Jobs With a Psychology Bachelor's Degree: Expert Advice for Launching Your Career

Psychology is one of the most popular college majors and can lead to a satisfying career in many different fields. If graduate school is not in your immediate plans, this book is for you. It will show you how to leverage your bachelor's degree to find a career with intellectual, emotional, and perhaps even financial rewards.

In this book, 28 professionals describe the scope of their work, level of career satisfaction, and how their bachelor's degree in psychology helped get them there. You also get a snapshot of salary, benefits, and day-to-day pleasures and challenges in a variety of jobs as well as advice and questions to help you reflect on the classes, internships, experiences, and attitudes that will make you a success in your career of choice.

In addition to the profiles, this book offers detailed instructions for how to use interest inventory and career search tools such as the Holland Self-Directed Search and O*NET database to refine your post-college plans. It candidly reviews best and worst strategies for resume building, job searching, and interviewing and offers up-to-date tips on how to combine personal networking and technology to get noticed. As a bonus, author Eric Landrum provides a backstage pass to the research behind this book, uncovering the process so you can appreciate the data or perhaps get some ideas for your next project.

Preface: From Bachelor's Degree to Career Success

I. Making Yourself Workforce Ready

1. What is Career Success to You? An Inventory of Expectations
2. Finding the Career that is Right for You

II. In Their Own Words: Profiles of Psychology Baccalaureates and Their Career Choices

3. Early-Career Professionals in Social Fields
4. Middle and Later-Career Professionals in Social Fields
5. Enterprising Careers
6. Conventional, Realistic, Artistic, and Investigative Careers
7. Themes and Advice from the Profiles

III. Putting Your Own Career Search Into Orbit

8. Searching for Job Opportunities
9. Selling Yourself: Preparing the Résumé That Is Right for You
10. Nibbles are Good: Preparing for a Job Interview

IV. Backstage Pass: The Study That Lead to This Book

11. Research Methodology Tipsheet

References

Index

About the Author

R. Eric Landrum, PhD, is a professor of psychology at Boise State University (BSU). He received his doctorate in cognitive psychology (with an emphasis in quantitative methodology) from Southern Illinois University–Carbondale in 1989. His research interests center on the study of educational issues, identifying those conditions that best facilitate student success (broadly defined).

He has given more than 200 presentations at professional conferences and has published 17 books or book chapters, and more than 60 articles in scholarly, peer-reviewed journals. His work has appeared in journals such as Teaching of Psychology, College Teaching, Educational and Psychological Measurement, the Journal of College Student Development, the Journal of Research and Development in Education, and College Student Journal.

Dr. Landrum has worked with more than 200 undergraduate research assistants, and in 17 years at BSU, he has taught more than 10,000 students. During summer 2008, he participated in the National Conference for Undergraduate Education in Psychology at the University of Puget Sound, serving as the leader of a working group concerned with the desired results of an undergraduate education in psychology.

Dr. Landrum is the coeditor and author of two chapters in Protecting Human Subjects: Departmental Subject Pools and Institutional Review Boards (1999, APA) and lead author of The Psychology Major: Career Options and Strategies for Success (3rd ed., 2007).

He is a member of the APA and a fellow of the Society for the Teaching of Psychology (APA Division 2), and he was recently elected its secretary. In addition, Dr. Landrum is an active member of the Midwestern Psychological Association and the Rocky Mountain Psychological Association.

He is an award-winning teacher (Associated Students of BSU Outstanding Faculty Member Award, 1994 and 2005; BSU Foundation Scholars Outstanding Teacher Award, 2002) and researcher (BSU's College of Social Sciences and Public Affairs Tenured Research Award, 2004). At BSU, Dr. Landrum teaches courses in general psychology (in the classroom and online), introduction to the psychology major, statistical methods, research methods, and psychological measurements.

He has served as national president of the Council of Teachers of Undergraduate Psychology and has served Psi Chi both locally and regionally. He was department chair from 1996 to 2000 and again from 2005 to 2006.