Building a meaningful career as a psychology grad – dispelling misconceptions, and a systematic approach to exploring career options PART 1 by Win Ee

“If you take psychology, you have to take a masters after.”

“What you can do with a psychology degree is very limited.”

“My time studying psychology was a waste, it’s just not useful in finding a job.”

There are some common gripes that I hear from graduates of psychology graduates and undergrads on the cusp of graduating. There are entire school confessions posts dedicated to ranting about the situation that seemingly validates and reifies this experience. This motivates my post today: Is it true that a psychology degree holds you back from achieving your full career potential? What is the real picture like? What can you do to help bolster your chances of building a meaningful career?

Firstly, I would like to address some implicit assumptions behind some commonly-bandied statements such as the above that are not necessarily true, and may be setting students/early career professionals up for dismal experiences in the jobs market:

1) Your degree is the main determinant of you finding a job

This is untrue – what employers are looking at are your relevant practical experiences, demonstrable skillsets, portfolios, personality-culture fit, and other attributes. Increasingly, what degree you have isn’t as important as what you’ve accomplished and what you can do. The “get a degree, get a job” model is flawed and the wrong way to think about it, and entangling the two inherently causes a huge mismatch between graduates and what the jobs market is looking for. The fact of the matter is that school today doesn’t really prepare students with the necessary skills for jobs, and this skills gap is responsible for some structural unemployment that we see today. While we can lament how school fails to live up to its promise of better jobs (not that I think this is or should be its purpose – but that’s an entirely different topic entirely), it’s important to recognise the reality today for what it is so we can take actions that help us in what we want to do. And that’s to recognise that school is an important component of building yourself to be ready for the workforce, but it’s not enough. 

      

     2)Your potential is limited by what you chose to study in school

      

      I won’t go deep into this because it’s self-evidently untrue. With the resources we have today via the internet and the huge boom in the digital education industry, it’s possible to rebuild and renew yourself every year. There are tons of anecdotes of career switches and job changes, and the median time where one stays in a particular job or industry has considerably decreased in recent years. We live in an era that’s very different from that of our parents – if we can leverage the resources we have, it’s very possible to change our fortunes no matter where we are at. A growth mindset is important to take advantage of this shift in landscape, but you’ve probably heard that already. Pairing that up with a radical ownership mindset is much more important in my opinion – if you live with a frame where you are responsible for where you are, where you want to be in life, and recognise that you have the agency and ability (or the capacity to develop it) to change your life, there’s very little that’s out of your reach given time. That said, I’m not a fan of the upgraditis cult where upgrading and hustling is what you should always be doing with your time either. That is an incredibly unhealthy mindset that diminishes meaning for your life and misses the point (What are you upgrading for? Does what you want to do require that? Upgrading is a means, not an end. And you are an end, not a means – think about these two statements). The idea is you can set flexible, achievable desired goals and meet them while balancing other life priorities – which is not something even far-fetched to believe.

      3) You have to complete postgrad if you study psychology / your career options are somehow limited

There are several first-order misconceptions that perpetuate this, such as the idea that studying psychology means you have to be a psychologist (which I’m sure quite lot would have to explain that’s not the case to inquisitive relatives during Lunar New Year visitations), or that jobs are intractably tied to schooling (which I addressed in point 2 above). These are wrong and result in unhelpful behaviours.

The above implicit assumptions need to shift. They hold people back from doing what is necessary to achieve outcomes they want because they mislabel antecedents and preconditions, in turn locking them into predicaments that they accept to be immutable, but are actually changeable. With all this said, I hope to give some concrete recommendations on what actions you can take.

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If you’ve ever been to a career coach in school, they’ll likely tell you that for those not applying for post-grad studies, the first careers psychology graduates embark on are likely in one of these fields/industries/functions. 

1.      Financial Advisory
2.      Human Resources
3.      Recruitment
4.      Social Services
5.      Government

While the majority of psychology graduates explore these paths at the outset, don’t have the false idea that these are the only options available to you. For instance, you could very easily start off doing user experience (since psychology grads have a research, cognitive psychology, and human factors background), data analytics (statistics, experimental design, research methods) or in a management associate program (workplace/organizational/personnel psychology, understanding of interpersonal relations, some business intuition). These are but a few examples that stretch ideas of what you can do – and quickly you’ll find that your universe of options expands quickly once you embark on the exploration process; it’s really about discovering what else is out there rather than being locked into what others/society commonly prescribes. That’s one core problem we have today – we don’t do enough discovery and that limits us.

The central idea is to identify the following:

1. What do you actually want to do?
2. What are some core skills that your study provides?
3. What are some jobs in (1) that map well to the skills of your study in school, and what are some gaps that you need to fill?

Many falter at (1). For those that are not inclined to pursue being a psychologist (which this post is targeted at), a lot struggle with figuring out what they want to do. And frankly, they shouldn’t expect to be able to figure that out – how do you know what you want when you’ve never even tried it yet? And how can you know when you don’t even have the full landscape of what is even available out there? 

Next post I will talk about my  5-step career exploration framework that can help you to figure this out. Stay tuned!