You might have heard that “psychology’s a bad major because you can’t get a job without a graduate degree.”
It’s not true.
Psychology majors get all kinds of jobs out of college. If you are interested in business, you may be hired on the management trainee track at a big consulting firm. You can work in human resources in a large organization, helping to train, and retain employees. You can work effectively in sales or retail management. You might help a market research firm analyze data or run a focus group.
In the human services field, you might find a job working for a non-profit organization, working in fundraising, grant writing, or conducting outcome evaluations. Or, at such an organization, you could work directly with populations of people in need.
If you are interested in helping those with psychological disorders, you can be employed as a psychiatric technician at a hospital, helping to run group sessions and work with patients. In an outpatient or school-based program, you can be trained to work one-on-one with children with autism spectrum disorder.
Explore this page:
>Focus on developing transferrable skills
>The Career Services Center
>Careers After Psychology Graduate School
>Other Resources
Focus on developing transferrable skills
- Here is a Forbes article listing 10 skills employers want in 2015 graduates.
- Here is USA Today article describing what employers want in recent college graduates.
Which of these skills have your courses and experiences helped you develop?
Generally speaking, there are three sets of skills that make a psychology major employable.
- First, your general liberal arts skills such as critical thinking, reading, writing, and analyzing are useful in a wide range of professions.
- Second, psychology majors have learned how to do research on people. These research skills are unique to psychology majors and are one reason that employers may want to hire psychology majors.
- Third, psychology majors learn a core set of knowledge about how and why people think, feel, and behave: this knowledge (based in research) is useful in many people-centered jobs.
Good advice from the Forbes article,
“The good news for grads: No matter what you have studied in school, whether anthropology or French or computer science, you will have had to learn the top five skills on the list. The trick is to demonstrate that you have those skills through your cover letter, résumé and interview. Think about class projects where you have been a team member or leader and jobs where you have had to plan and prioritize. Describe those skills specifically in your résumé and cover letter and in your job interview.”
The Career Services Center
The Career Services Center (CSC) is THE BEST resource for your career development. Just to name a few resources, they offer:
- A database of available internships
- Résumé help
- Workshops on career development
- Job fairs
Want to make an appointment? Click here.
Visit them at 401 Academy St
Drop in hours are every weekday2pm – 4pm
Call them at 302-831-2392
Email them at [email protected]
Follow them on Twitter: @UDcareers
Careers After Psychology Graduate School
If you do decide that graduate school is for you, there are a number of careers available from delivering clinical services to academia to consulting. Please see the After Graduate School section of our website.
Here is brief list of possibilities you may have never thought of:
- Facebook Data Scientist
- Political Campaign Consultant
- Human Factors and Engineering Design
- Health Promotion
- Toy Company Design Consultant
- NASA Organizational Effectiveness
and many more!