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Psychology Career Changes

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Is it possible to change careers within the psychology field?

Psychology Career Changes

Psychology career changes can be more difficult to navigate than career changes within other fields. As en example consider a newspaper editor who wishes to break into the magazine industry as an editor. While they are two different working environments many of the skills required such as proofreading documents, meeting deadlines and overseeing layout designs are very similar. This individual may find it trying but not impossible to make this career change. Conversely consider an individual with only a bachelors degree in psychology who is working in a career as a probations officer. This individual will not find it easy to switch to a career in clinical psychology. This is because practicing as a clinical psychologist requires completion of a doctoral degree as well as passing licensing examinations and requirements. Therefore, this type of career change would be much more difficult to make.

Even graduates who already have a doctoral degree may find they are not able to easily make career changes within the psychology field. This is because during the course of obtaining their doctorate they likely chose a very specific course of study. This may qualify the individual for his current career but may not necessarily qualify him for other psychology careers.

Related Tip: Psychology career changes are certainly possible but they may require a great deal of time and effort. Career changes within the psychology field which have similar degree and licensing requirements may be easy but making changes which require higher level degrees are often much more complicated. In these cases it is still possible to make a career change but the individual will likely be required to take additional courses and obtain additional degrees to change careers successfully.

   

Comments

10/31/2007 9:24:39 PM
Jacqui said:

Frankly, I would not consider a newspaper editor moving to magazine editing as a career change at all. And the change from a probations officer to a clinical psychologist is obviously an enormous elevation and progression but not really what I would thing of as a career change - more like something of more or less the same caliber but a different field, such as, for example, a newspaper editor to a clinical psychologist or an investment banker to a school teacher. And it sort of goes without saying that it will be hard and involve all sorts of logistics and qualifications. SO fairly useless tip. What would have been good was to say how many people do it and how they do it, for example.




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