My presidential year has been a remarkably fulfilling experience for me, professionally and personally. I have relished engaging with APA members and students, partnering with psychologists worldwide, enjoying and learning at convention, honoring colleagues with presidential citations, participating in my initiatives, and integrating the arts and psychology. I am grateful to all the psychologists, especially the members of my Presidential Cabinet and the APA Board of Directors, psychology students, APA staff, and family and friends who were part of the village that made this year so successful.
Throughout this year, I had many meaningful experiences. One recent highlight was APA's "Opening Doors Summit: Facilitating Transitions from Doctoral Education to First Job" (see Opening doors for psychology’s future), co-chaired by Drs. Stephen McCutcheon and Debra Bangasser and staffed by APA's Education Directorate. I chose this initiative because I have devoted much of my career to educating, training and mentoring psychologists at all levels. I believe we have a responsibility to find solutions to the career challenges they face and to enable them to forge new and exciting career paths.
The summit participants came from diverse backgrounds, ranging from program officers from the National Institutes of Health, to training directors, to graduate school faculty, to basic science postdoctoral fellows to health-service psychology graduate students. Reflecting my goal of uniting psychology, the summit participants focused on barriers and opportunities for both health service/other applied and research basic/applied psychologists. Through our conversations, we recognized — somewhat to our surprise — that these two groups have many concerns in common and this recognition brought us much closer together. It gave me hope for continuing our efforts to unite our scientists, practitioners, educators and social activists.
We also gleaned information from various constituencies before the summit, as well as experts via technology during the summit. The result was rich conversation that enabled us to think more effectively outside the box.
At the summit, we broke into three workgroups: one looking at preparing a competent workforce, a second exploring the roles and responsibilities of trainees and training communities, and a third looking at expanding future opportunities for psychologists in the pipeline. The workgroups articulated the requisite knowledge, skills and attitudes for individuals to successfully transition to graduate school and beyond. We also discussed known and suspected factors associated with pipeline leakage and blockage, such as the internship imbalance, prolonged postdoctoral training and the declining number of faculty positions. We then delineated ways to address these challenges.
Among the products we hope to create are a toolkit for each pipeline transition for trainers and trainees; resource guides on how to be a competent advisor and mentor; individualized development plans for each training phase and beyond; and webcasts that feature psychologists in innovative careers.
Summit participants also issued a strong call for implementing the recommendations associated with the "Courageous Conversations" focused on the internship imbalance, such as advocating for internship funding. In addition, summit members are hopeful that APA's new Center for Workforce Studies, now under the capable leadership of Quita Mullen, PhD, will address critical workforce questions. These include the factors that predict graduate school success, programmatic best practices that lead to success, challenges during training, factors associated with attrition, data on underemployment and misemployment, numbers of psychologists in different career paths, range of emerging first positions and information about how these change over the first five years, and forecasts on emerging pathways.
Summit participants are crafting a series of articles to review the findings and highlight the recommendations. Products will begin to appear next year on the APA Education Directorate website.
As I end my presidential year, it's clear that the future of psychology is bright, shifting and full of opportunities, many of which we need to create. I am excited about continuing to work collaboratively and creatively so we can maximize these opportunities for current and future generations of psychologists. Doing so will enhance their lives, enrich and unite our profession and discipline, and enable us to serve society more effectively. I am firmly committed to continuing to devote my time and energy on these endeavors; my other initiatives on psychologists in patient-centered medical homes and translating psychological science to the public; integrating the arts and psychology; and interacting with global psychology partners to strengthen psychology throughout the world.
