A Practical Guide to Choosing a Job in Psychology

Say you've finished a solid formal education in psychology and you're now scanning the field for where to put it to work. Plenty of roles are open to you. The honest starting point is that good positions tend to follow good training, and a number of professional psychology schools exist precisely to give you the grounding employers look for. Education alone isn't the whole picture, though. You also want a clear sense of which part of psychology you intend to major in before you go any further.

Why does that specialization matter so much? Psychology spreads across many subjects, and you can pick almost any of them to concentrate on. Each branch studies the behavior of different kinds of people, whatever their background or social standing. Figure out the sort of work environment you can actually picture yourself in day to day, then work backward and choose the stream that gets you there.

Take a couple of examples. If you imagine yourself supporting law and order, working alongside the police, forensic psychology or criminal psychology might fit. A criminal psychologist looks at how an offender's mind operates: the motives, the circumstances, the chain of events that pushed a person toward what they did. Now suppose sport and athletics are more your thing. Sports psychology keeps you close to that world, and the work centers on helping athletes build endurance and sharpen their competitive edge. Those are only two possibilities out of many open to someone practicing as a psychologist.

The surest route into any of these jobs is to get proper guidance, counseling, and an education that covers the full width of the field.