Professor Michael Kyrios says some of the strongest employment opportunities for psychologists in the short term will be in priority health areas such as mental health and obesity.
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Psychologist Sally-Anne McCormack has just finished providing comment for a radio segment about narcissism in children and adolescents when she answers the call for this interview.
Once this conversation is finished, she’s scheduled to conduct a long interview with a school, liaise with another doctor and see a client in her private practice. There’s no shortage of diversity in the day-to-day happenings of McCormack’s psychology career, she says.
“There are lots of little things behind just seeing clients,” says McCormack.
In Australia today, there are more than 30,000 psychology practitioners, the latest data from the Psychology Board of Australia shows.
According to the Australian Psychological Society (APS), psychologists are employed in diverse settings including schools, hospitals, prisons, universities and market research companies, and they specialise in various types of psychology including sport and exercise, forensic and organisational.
Professor Michael Kyrios, president of the APS, says some of the strongest employment opportunities for psychologists in the short term will be in priority health areas such as mental health and obesity.
He adds that there is an emerging demand for psychologists to help drive business performance, to deliver “positive psychology” services (to foster a pro-active approach to sustaining wellbeing) and to strengthen leadership quality.
“Some of the careers are related to helping others but others are outside of the psychology domain,” Kyrios says. “So, business or HR, managing, education and schools. There’s actually no area of human endeavour that doesn’t have psychology skills.”
Kyrios’ own psychology career has been dynamic. Presently the director of the research school of psychology at the Australian National University, he has held jobs in academia and research, teaching, practice and administration. He was the 2013 recipient of the Ian M Campbell memorial prize in clinical psychology and also received the 2011 citation for excellence from the Society for General Psychology and the American Psychological Association. To date, he has contributed more than 120 publications to the field of psychology.
He didn’t foresee this trajectory at the outset, however. Early in his career, he says he needed to be somewhat resilient to attain the kind of career he wanted.
“I was a little bit frustrated with undergraduate psychology because I thought it was not teaching the sets of skills that I wanted,” says Kyrios. “But in retrospect, I have found that I really needed that scientific basis to better understand what I needed to do to be a really good practitioner.”
It’s mandatory for Australian psychologists to complete six years of training and education to attain general registration to practice as a psychologist. This involves an undergraduate degree and honours, followed by either a masters/PhD, graduate diploma and supervised experience or a two-year approved internship.
McCormack, a clinical psychologist who specialises in treating clients who experience anxiety, depression and stress, has various qualifications, including a Master of Psychology (educational and developmental) from Monash University. She made the switch to psychology after her previous career as a school teacher.
“I see a lot of children and adolescents, mainly because of my background being a teacher,” she says. “So I’m probably best known for children and adolescents but I do actually see a lot of adults as well, and I prefer not to see [just] one particular group of people.”
McCormack has also authored books and developed a profile as a media commentator for print, radio and TV as her psychology career has evolved. But she advises new psychologists to garner experience in different settings and under the wing of more experienced psychologists before they branch out on their own.
Psychologists are much more likely to establish a solid client base once they develop a solid profile too, she adds.
“But it’s such a rewarding job,” she says. “When you see people in the depths of despair and you help them find a positive future, there is nothing more awesome than that feeling.”