Special Section – Career Issues and the Undergraduate Psychology Major

Teaching of Psychology
2018, Vol. 45(1) 14-23
Preparing Psychology Majors to Enter ª The Author(s) 2017
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the Workforce: Then, Now, With Whom, DOI: 10.1177/0098628317744944
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and How

Drew C. Appleby1

Abstract
Undergraduate psychology programs have not always provided the same level of support for their job-seeking students than they
have for those preparing to become psychologists. This is a particularly unfortunate situation because, according to the American
Psychological Association’s Center for Workforce Studies (American Psychological Association, 2017), only 13% of the 3.4 million
people in the United States who have earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology have gone on to earn a higher psychology degree.
The first part of this article uses quotations from seven national reports on the psychology curriculum to identify the genesis and
gradual amelioration of this unfortunate situation. The remainder of this article focuses on strategies that psychology faculty can
use to help their job-seeking students successfully accomplish Goal 5: Professional Development of the APA Guidelines for the
Undergraduate Psychology Major. These strategies include referring advisees to professionally trained advisors and becoming aware
of careers in which baccalaureate-level psychology majors have entered or can prepare to enter and the sets of knowledge, skills,
and characteristics important for success in these careers.

Keywords
psychology majors, career advising, academic advising, workforce preparation

This article has four purposes. My first purpose is to identify
portions of the reports of seven national investigations of the
undergraduate psychology major that illustrate the evolution of
psychology’s official position on the role that psychology
faculty should play in the preparation of their students who plan
to enter the workforce rather than preparing to become psychol-
ogists. My second purpose is to identify three types of career-
advising professionals to whom psychology faculty can refer
their job-seeking students when a perceived lack of professional
expertise may place them in ethical jeopardy. My third purpose
is to identify five broad occupational areas in which substantial
numbers of psychology majors whose highest degree is a bac-
calaureate report they are employed, divide these into their
career subareas, list specific jobs in each subarea, and provide
access to the knowledge, skills, and characteristics (KSCs) nec-
essary to succeed in these careers. My fourth purpose is to
identify a set of occupational areas in which few psychology
majors report they are employed, but which can be prepared for
and entered with the KSCs that psychology majors can acquire.
My hope is that this information will provide psychology
faculty with both the willingness and the ability to help their
students accomplish two of the most important outcomes of
Goal 5: Professional Development of the APA Guidelines
for the Undergraduate Psychology Major (American Psy-
chological Association [APA], 2013) by making them aware
of the “settings in which people with backgrounds in
psychology typically work” and the “skill sets desired by
employers who hire or select people with psychology back-
grounds” (p. 35).
Seven National Reports on the Psychology
Curriculum
So how did we come to this situation in which we inadvertently
at best—and deliberately at worst—expend more time and
energy on our students whose postbaccalaureate aspirations
involve graduate school than on those who plan to use their
major in psychology to prepare themselves for immediate
entrance into the workforce? Halonen (2013) labeled this group
“The Great Unwashed” and used the term “The Worthies” to
describe their graduate school–bound peers whose postbacca-
laureate plans cause faculty to consider them to be worthy of
greater attention, additional guidance, and stronger support.
And, how can we travel to a new academic destination where
we are willing and able to (a) provide our job-seeking majors
with a set of careers they can prepare to enter with a bachelor’s
1
Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis, Indianapolis, IN, USA
Corresponding Author:
Drew C. Appleby, 107 Glentown Way, Atlanta, GA 30328, USA.
Email: dappleby@iupui.edu
Appleby
degree, (b) convince them that we value them regardless of
their postbaccalaureate aspirations, and (c) expose them to both
classroom and experiential opportunities that will provide them
with the KSCs they will need to succeed in the careers to which
they aspire, experience the satisfaction of having done their
jobs well, and value the undergraduate education that produced
their satisfaction?
A glimpse into our past can help us identify the origins of this
unfortunate situation and to understand how we have been trying
to correct it. The documents that can help us to do this are the
following seven reports authored by groups of noted psychological
educators whose purpose was to study the undergraduate psychol-
ogy curriculum, identify its appropriate objectives, and recom-
mend practical methods to accomplish these objectives. My
purpose is not to describe these reports in detail—which Brewer
(2009) has done for all but the most recent—but rather to select
quotations from these documents that illuminate the possible
causes of why psychology educators in the past have not always
been willing to provide adequate support for their students who
plan to end their formal education with a bachelor’s degree. The
first three of these documents reveal that their authors appeared to
be aware of the nature and causes of these shortcomings and the
reasons why these shortcomings continued to exist, including
departmental priorities and faculty opinions that could be det-
rimental to the education of their job-seeking majors. The final
four reports reveal ever-increasing attempts to ameliorate this
situation.
The 1952 Cornell Conference Report
This report resulted from the first national conference on under-
graduate psychology and began with the declaration that
“instruction at the undergraduate level is presented for the ben-
efit of students” (Buxton et al., 1952, p. 1). It continued with the
message that psychology should be taught as a rigorous, scien-
tific discipline within the liberal arts tradition that eschews
courses whose subject matter pertains to personal adjustment
or vocational preparation. Although the authors acknowledged
that “most undergraduate students will not become psy-
chologists” (p. 3), they also declared that “it is uneconomical
to try to teach job skills to undergraduates” (p. 44) and that “the
best provision possible must be made for the preparation of
students who will work professionally in the field of psy-
chology” (p. 43). So, what may prevent psychology departments
from benefiting the majority of their students by offering classes
that can provide them with essential personal and workforce
skills? One component of the answer to this question—the man-
ner in which faculty view their undergraduate teaching respon-
sibilities—was revealed in the following quotation.
“Unfortunately, undergraduate instruction in some institutions
carries little prestige and is regarded as a chore to be completed
as effortlessly as possible, so that more important matters, usu-
ally graduate instruction and research, may be attended” (p. 50).
The authors identified a second potential cause for down-
playing the role of job skills in the psychology curriculum in
the following quotation that communicates the cardinal
15
importance of the transmission of content knowledge in psy-
chology classes,
Thus, while values, habits of thought, and knowledge should all be
considered in planning a course, in the actual teaching emphasis
must be on the course content. If the teacher does not believe that
the content of what he is teaching is important, he had better not
teach; and the student had better not listen. (p. 10)
Thus, the Cornell report recommended that undergraduate
education in psychology should (a) be taught as a rigorous,
scientific discipline within the liberal arts tradition by eschew-
ing courses that promote vocational preparation and personal
adjustment, (b) stress knowledge rather than skills and values,
and (c) benefit all students, but that some students (i.e., those
seeking to enter graduate school to prepare to become profes-
sional psychologists) should be benefited more than others. The
similarity of part (c) to the infamous quotation in Animal Farm,
“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than
others” (Orwell, 1945, p. 134), is hard to ignore and seems
particularly disturbing if Buxton et al. (1952) were describing
reality when they said, “many instructors look forward to the
day when their duties will no longer require concern for the
undergraduate; some even dream of the studentless university”
(p. 50) even though the official position of their department is
that “instruction at the undergraduate level is presented for the
benefit of students” (p. 1).
The 1961 Michigan Report
This report expanded upon the Cornell report by recognizing
the needs of three different groups of undergraduate psychol-
ogy students: (a) those preparing to enter graduate school to
become psychologists, (b) those preparing for graduate school
to enter other professions, and (c) those using their undergrad-
uate educations to prepare for immediate entry into the work-
force. The recognition of the existence of this third group—
labeled “terminal psychology majors” (McKeachie & Milhol-
land, 1961, p. 31)—acknowledged their existence, but also
caused the authors to question the legitimacy of their educa-
tional goals when they stated that “Going to college means
more than vocational training” (p. 31) and hinting that these
students may be less intellectually capable than their graduate
school–bound peers when they said the “ability level of the
student body is related to vocational aspirations” (p. 27).
Although the authors of this report recognized and were sym-
pathetic to the needs of their job-seeking students, they seemed
to believe that the ideal undergraduate curriculum in psychol-
ogy should be “firmly anchored in the liberal arts, rejecting
undergraduate vocational training as a primary goal” (p. 33).
As a way of tempering this strong statement about the legiti-
macy of the occupational aspirations of their terminal
students—or more likely as a way of explaining that it
reflected the convictions of many of their colleagues rather
than their own—the authors recognized their program’s culp-
ability for the excessively magnanimous manner in which
16
they treated their students who plan to become psychologists
when they wrote,
While this group will ordinarily form only a small minority of
psychology students, it is an important one for us. In most depart-
ments, we are probably too conscious of the needs of these students
and fail to give adequate consideration to the needs of the others in
our curricular planning. (p. 29)
This admission of programmatic bias based on occupational
aspiration appears to be the first official acknowledgment of
the unfortunate situation that caused Halonen (2013) to draw
our attention to the plight of the “Great Unwashed” 52 years
later. It is important to note that although this report was
authored by the two directors of the conference that produced
it, they clearly attributed its contents and opinions to a broader
group when they stated, “Ideas came from everyone, and this
report is in no sense a compilation solely of the points of view
of its full-time participants” (p. 10).
The 1973 Kulik Report
This report differed from the previous two in three ways. First,
it was sanctioned, funded, and published by APA. Second, it
reported the results of a national survey of chairpersons from a
wide variety of psychology departments. Third, the author ada-
mantly refused to offer or support a particular curricular model
because he did not want to impair the freedom of individual
psychology departments to do their “own thing” (Kulik, 1973,
p. v) by engaging in or experimenting with novel curricula that
fit their unique academic atmospheres and institutional mis-
sions. Kulik expanded this caveat when he said that any such
action would be “seen as a threat to this freedom, and . . . that
the Association should not be engaged in the specification of
curricula nor in the development of texts or other teaching
materials” (p. v).
The most valuable information from this report for the pur-
poses of the present article is the results of its survey that
pertain to the occupational trajectories of psychology majors,
which Kulik summarized in the following quote.
Nearly 40% of students majoring in psychology—by chairmen’s
estimates—seek full-time employment upon graduation. The
number of students seeking full-time employment is greater than
the number oriented toward graduate work, and it is worth spec-
ulating about the possibility that curricula in psychology have
paid insufficient attention to the terminal baccalaureate . . . . Stu-
dents majoring in psychology generally have varied career goals.
At most schools, a program that is simply a foundation for later
academic work in psychology will not meet the needs of its stu-
dents. (pp. 16–17)
The Cornell and Michigan reports wrestled with these same
issues and came to similar conclusions, but the Kulik report
backed them up with data.
Teaching of Psychology 45(1)
The 1993 Handbook for Enhancing Undergraduate
Education in Psychology
It is now time to move the clock almost two decades ahead to a
project that not only addressed the challenges broached by the
three previous reports, but also integrated “the scholarship and
practice of the teaching and learning of psychology to produce
a practical handbook for psychology faculty who work with
undergraduates” (McGovern, 1993, p. 4). This project was the
1991 St. Mary’s Conference, and the two chapters in the hand-
book it produced most germane to the subject of this article
were those that addressed assessment and advising. The assess-
ment chapter—whose importance was recognized by it place-
ment as the handbook’s leadoff chapter—was based on two
crucial, but often unspoken questions, “How do we want our
students to change as a result of their education” (Halpern et al.,
1993, p. 27) in terms of their KSCs, and how can we be sure
these changes have actually occurred? The authors identified
three formidable challenges to the efficacy of American higher
education launched by economists and politicians who pointed
out that American students were falling behind their interna-
tional peers in crucial academic areas; national educational
groups who were beginning to question the purpose, value, and
integrity of the baccalaureate degree; and higher education’s
stakeholders (i.e., taxpayers, state legislatures, and employers)
who were questioning the value of the return on the substantial
investment known as a college education. The authors’ answers
to these challenges were to suggest that higher education
should become more data-based by clearly defining its objec-
tives (i.e., the specific KSCs its students can and should acquire
and strengthen), making these objectives clear to both its stu-
dents and its stakeholders, collecting data to determine whether
these objectives are accomplished, and then using these data to
make curricular improvements designed to produce even more
positive student outcomes in the future.
The handbook’s chapter on academic advising introduced a
professional activity designed to help psychology students uti-
lize their undergraduate opportunities to choose and prepare for
their careers that had not been acknowledged in the three previ-
ous reports. Although some faculty and students view advising
as only the transmission of information that will produce a
timely graduation date (i.e., institutional rules and required
classes), the chapter’s authors made it abundantly clear that
academic advisors should also provide guidance to enhance
self-knowledge, decision-making, immediate career opportuni-
ties, and graduate school alternatives. A well-designed advising
program can help departments “define liberal arts outcomes and
career development as mutually possible” (McGovern, 1993,
p. 229) by embracing the advice provided in the assessment
chapter to provide students with a clear understanding about how
they can use their undergraduate educations to develop the spe-
cific KSCs they will need to achieve their postbaccalaureate
aspirations, regardless of what these aspirations may be (see
Landrum, 2018; Vespia, Freis, & Arrowood, 2018).
Another section of the handbook, titled Principles for Qual-
ity Undergraduate Programs, was adopted as official policy by
Appleby
APA 3 years after the close of the St. Mary’s Conference.
Perhaps the most important message from these Principles for
the purpose of this article was that quality undergraduate pro-
grams should enable students “to pursue a variety of post-
baccalaureate alternatives including employment and graduate
or professional school” (p. 19). At long last, the desire of psy-
chology majors to enter the workforce immediately after gra-
duation was officially recognized as not just the fate of those
who do not wish to follow their professors’ career paths, but as
a legitimate alternative to the pursuit of a graduate degree.
The 2007 APA Guidelines for the Psychology Major
Sixteen years after its official adoption of the Principles of
Quality Undergraduate Programs, APA (2007) published its
Guidelines for the Undergraduate Psychology Major based on
the work of the Task Force on Undergraduate Psychology
Major Competencies that convened in 2001. This document
contained a set of 10 optimal performance outcomes that psy-
chology majors should attain. Five supported the goals of a
traditional liberal arts education, and five pertained to the sci-
ence and application of psychology. The final two liberal arts
goals (Goal 9: Personal Development and Goal 10: Career
Planning and Development) reflect a clear reversal of the Cor-
nell report’s assertions that the psychology curriculum should
not contain elements designed to promote personal adjustment
or vocational preparation. At last, psychology majors gained
official blessing from their discipline’s largest scientific and
professional organization to use their undergraduate educations
to “develop insight into their own and other’s behavior and
mental processes and apply effective strategies for self-
management and self-improvement” (APA, 2007, p. 20) and
to “pursue realistic ideas about how to implement their psycho-
logical knowledge, skills, and values in occupational pursuits
in a variety of settings that meet personal goals and societal
needs” (p. 21).
The 2010 Undergraduate Education in Psychology:
A Blueprint for the Future of the Discipline
This book resulted from the 2008 National Conference on
Undergraduate Education in Psychology (the Puget Sound
Conference), which followed in the tradition of the St. Mary’s
Conference by emphasizing the need for psychology programs
to provide their job-seeking students with multiple opportuni-
ties to develop the KSCs necessary to enter and succeed in the
workforce. However, the mandate for this outcome, the delega-
tion of responsibility for its achievement, and the culpability
for its failure were communicated even more clearly this time,
as demonstrated by the following quote: “Faculty members
need to recognize that if their students fail to achieve necessary
competencies in the skills employers value, then faculty have
failed to prepare their students for postbaccalaureate success”
(Landrum et al., 2010, p. 152).
These authors approached the preparation that students need
to succeed after graduation differently than those who created
17
the previous five documents by saying, “being successful in the
workplace requires similar skill sets as being successful in
graduate school” (p. 151), thus suggesting that creating
different arrays of academic experiences for immediate job-
seeking and graduate school–bound psychology majors is
unnecessary. Another quote from the Blueprint that clearly
communicates how serious the authors were about the level
of responsibility that psychology educators have for their stu-
dents’ postbaccalaureate success is that they “should work to
incorporate aspects of career planning and development in
each course as relevant and impart to their students a work
ethic that poises students for success in the workplace”
(p. 151) because “students need to be able to demonstrate to
others not only their acquired knowledge but also well-
developed skills and abilities” (p. 159). The chapter in the
Blueprint that dealt with the desired outcomes of an under-
graduate education in psychology concluded with the follow-
ing call to action: “We recommend an increased effort to
achieve greater understanding of the career development of
psychology students” (p. 160).
The 2013 APA Guidelines for the Psychology Major:
Version 2.0
APA mandates a review of its approved guidelines every
7 years, and a task force convened to begin this task for the
2007 Guidelines in 2012. Economic instability and allega-
tions—both anecdotal and data-based—that psychology majors
are unable to find jobs and are often overqualified for or dis-
satisfied with the jobs they attain caused the review committee
to bring attention to these issues and create the following rec-
ommended strategies and resources to resolve them.
1. An increased emphasis on the development of career-
related skills and the understanding that psychological
knowledge can be applied in a variety of occupational
settings (e.g., business, education, and health care).
2. The enlistment of career professionals to help students
in their career planning and pursuit.
3. An appendix containing 143 careers for which psychol-
ogy majors can prepare.
4. A developmental approach to the attainment of career-
related skills.
5. The decrease in the number of goals from 10 to 5,
thus increasing the relative importance of profes-
sional development, which had been one of 10 goals
in the original Guidelines, but was one of 5 in Ver-
sion 2.0.
The purpose of these strategies was to create “clearer
linkages between baccalaureate preparation and the work-
place” (p. 10), which the authors of the Guidelines believed
would help individual programs to “optimize the competi-
tiveness of their graduates for securing places in the work-
force” (p. 16).
18
Three Career Professionals Who Can Assist
Job-Seeking Psychology Majors During the
Career-Advising Process
The authors of the Guidelines urged psychology faculty to take
a more active and informed role in the career-advising process,
and they explained that one way to accomplish this task is to
utilize the expertise of other career professionals. The pur-
pose of this section is to identify these career professionals
and explain how they can augment the career-advising
efforts of psychology faculty. As Gordon (2006, p. 74) said
in her well-respected book titled Career Advising: An Aca-
demic Advisor’s Guide,
Advisors don’t need to be encyclopedias of career information, but
they do need to know what information is relevant to their partic-
ular advisees and where to locate it efficiently. Although advisors
have an obligation to provide a certain level of career information,
their most important role is to teach students how to obtain, eval-
uate, and use it.
Unfortunately, this role is not always carried out in a successful
manner because some psychology faculty may hesitate to pro-
vide specific career advice for ethical reasons. Section 2.01 of
APA’s (2017, para. 1) Ethical Principles of Psychologists and
Code of Conduct states, “Psychologists provide services,
teach, and conduct research with populations and in areas
only within the boundaries of their competence, based on their
education, training, supervised experience, consultation,
study or professional experience.” Few psychology faculty
have engaged in such professional experiences and, therefore,
may believe they will behave unethically if they provide spe-
cific career-related advice to their job-seeking students
because they lack the professional training or experience to
do so. This article can serve as a professional educational
experience to expand the boundaries of the services psychol-
ogy faculty deliver in their role of academic advisors in a
more confident, willing, and ethical manner. But they should
also understand that there are at least three other advising
professionals on their campuses who do possess the appropri-
ate education and training to provide career advice to psychol-
ogy majors in a competent and ethical manner.
Many psychology departments employ professional staff
advisors who have earned master’s degrees in areas such as
student development, higher education leadership, and career
development, which provide them with the professional experi-
ences necessary to successfully advise psychology majors
about the variety of career paths that do not require graduate
school. The knowledge they possess about extracurricular
opportunities such as internships, service learning, and student
organizations helps them convince psychology majors that the
KSCs they can acquire outside the classroom can be as valuable
as the ones they learn in their classes. Their ability to help
students become aware of the KSCs they will need to succeed
on-the-job—and then to identify and utilize the full spectrum of
their educational opportunities to acquire these KSCs—puts
Teaching of Psychology 45(1)
them in a unique position to complement the more academi-
cally oriented advice provided by faculty advisors.
A second campus professional who can help psychology
majors to identify, investigate, and prepare for a career with
a bachelor’s degree is an advisor in another academic depart-
ment (e.g., business, education, or social work). These advisors
can provide psychology majors with specific information about
courses in which they can enroll, activities in which they can
engage (e.g., internships and study abroad or exchange pro-
grams), and how to earn certificates in job-related skills (e.g.,
leadership, a foreign language, or a particular software appli-
cation) that will help them acquire the unique constellation of
KSCs required by the specific careers to which they aspire.
A third group of campus professionals who can provide
assistance to job-seeking psychology majors are career coun-
selors employed in campus career centers (see Schwartz,
Gregg, & McKee, 2018). These professionals can provide
students with career self-assessment, help them navigate the
job-search process, make them aware of job-placement oppor-
tunities, and provide them with professional counseling if
they struggle with personal issues such as indecisiveness,
which can be a significant obstacle during the career selection
process. They can also help psychology majors master the
skills they will need to make a successful college-to-career
transition such as writing effective cover letters, crafting
strong resumes, obtaining digital badges (Young, 2012), and
creating confident and convincing answers to challenging
interview questions.
Referring advisees to these three types of advising profes-
sionals allows psychology faculty to meet the following
requirement of Section 2.01b of APA’s Ethical Principles of
Psychologists and Code of Conduct (2017, para. 2), which
states, “Psychologists have or obtain the training, experience,
consultation or supervision necessary to ensure the competence
of their services, or they make appropriate referrals.” Psychol-
ogy faculty should be aware of the three aforementioned career
professionals on their campus who can provide career advice to
students, understand the services they can provide, and refer
their advisees to them when necessary. This is not only the
appropriate approach to career advising for psychology faculty;
it is the ethical approach.
Five Broad Occupational Areas in Which
Bachelor’s-Level Psychology Majors Often
Report They Are Employed and the KSCs
They Will Need to Succeed in These Areas
A major in psychology can and does prepare students for a wide
range of occupations regardless of whether they are one of the
46% who either immediately or eventually continue their edu-
cation in graduate or professional school (Carnevale, Cheah, &
Hanson, 2015). Recent reports from the APA Center for Work-
force Studies based on data from the U.S. Census (Christidis,
Stamm, & Lin, 2015) and the National Science Foundation
(Stamm, Lin, & Christidis, 2016) confirm the occupational
Appleby
flexibility of a bachelor’s degree in psychology by reporting
that substantial numbers of psychology majors report employ-
ment in areas including business, human resources, health care,
teaching, and social services.
But what are these jobs? APA provided an initial answer to
this question in Appendix E of its Guidelines (APA, 2013) by
providing a roster of 75 jobs available to those with a bache-
lor’s degree in psychology based on those reported by
Appleby, Millspaugh, and Hammersley (2011). The Guide-
line’s authors prefaced this list with the following sentences
that provided a compelling rationale for its existence and
brought their readers’ attention to the breadth of occupational
opportunities open to those with a bachelor’s degree in
psychology.
Critics often malign the baccalaureate degree in psychology as
ineffective preparation for the workforce. However, the list below
of potential careers for someone with a bachelor’s degree suggests
that a psychology major’s skills can be effectively deployed in a
variety of workplace contexts, including human services, health-
care, research, sales and marketing, and many others. (p. 65)
The remainder of this section will be devoted to five broad
occupational fields into which many psychology majors have
entered, based on the data provided by APA’s Center for Work-
force Studies. The first of these sections, which is devoted to
business careers, will also contain two tables. The first table
contains four subareas of business that psychology majors can
prepare to enter and a list of specific jobs (from Appleby,
2016b) that belong in each of these subareas. (See Appleby,
2016a, for the criteria used to select these jobs, strategies to
promote student career success, and lists of printed and online
resources to aid faculty in their career-advising activities.) The
second table contains the results of an analysis of data from the
Occupational Information Network (O*NET) on these jobs to
identify the KSCs that a substantial percentage of both profes-
sional job analysts and those actually employed in these jobs
report as important for on-the-job success. (See Igou, 2012, for
a description of O*NET and suggestions for its use as a career-
advising tool and Rajecki, 2009, for a step-by-step strategy for
students to identify, explore, and evaluate personalized career
options with O*NET).
It is important for faculty to realize that, although the broad
set of KSCs identified for success in each of the five occupa-
tional fields provides a good starting point for guiding their
students during the initial phases of career planning and explo-
ration, each of the subareas in these fields and each of the
specific jobs in these subareas requires a unique constellation
of KSCs. For example, 15 KSCs are important for success in all
business careers, and psychology faculty should make this
information available to their students who profess an interest
in this field and then offer them suggestions about how to attain
these KSCs. However, they should also make their advisees
aware that some of these KSCs are more essential than others
for success in certain subareas of business and for certain spe-
cific careers in these subareas. Consider two students who are
19
both interested in pursuing a business career, one who is inter-
ested in the subarea of management and wants to become a
department manager and one who would like to enter the sub-
area of sales as a real estate agent. Both will need the skills of
active listening and speaking and the characteristics of depend-
ability, integrity, and attention to detail. However, the student
who wants to be a department manager will need a greater
knowledge of administration and management and the student
who wants to be a real estate agent will need a greater grasp of
the concepts crucial for success in sales and marketing. This
type of conversation will also provide an opportunity for a
faculty member to refer students to (a) online career explora-
tion resources (e.g., O*NET and Appleby, 2016b) and (b) other
advising professionals who are in a position to provide more
detailed advice about how to acquire these KSCs by utilizing
resources located outside the psychology department.
Psychology faculty can use the information in this section to
help their job-seeking students accomplish the following objec-
tives of Goal 5: Professional Development of the Guidelines: to
“sharpen student readiness for post-baccalaureate employ-
ment” (p. 16) by helping them understand the “settings in
which people with backgrounds in psychology typically work”
(p. 35), describing “how psychology’s content applies to
business, health care, educational, and other workplace settings
(p. 33), becoming familiar with the “skill sets desired by
employers who hire or select people with psychology
backgrounds” (p. 35), thus helping them to “develop meaning-
ful professional directions” (p. 16).
The remaining four broad occupational fields in which
many psychology majors have reported they have entered
(i.e., human resources, health care, teaching, and social ser-
vices) are described in separate sections but, due to space con-
straints in this special issue, these sections do not contain the
two tables included in the section on business. Readers can
request these tables from the author.
Business
According to Merriam-Webster (n.d.), business involves
“making, buying, or selling goods or providing services in
exchange for money.” A career in business can take the form
of a variety of specific jobs that fall into four broad areas of
business (see Table 1). These activities can take place in many
different types of business environments (e.g., retail, real
estate, medical, financial, and advertising) and involve cus-
tomer service and sales, financial advice and assistance, and
training or managing those who provide these services. Psy-
chology majors can acquire, practice, and strengthen the major-
ity of the KSCs needed for these careers (see Table 2) in their
psychology and general education classes and in their extra-
curricular activities (e.g., serving as a teaching assistant, peer
advisor/mentor, or an officer in a student organization) and can
acquire knowledge about and experience with others (e.g., mar-
keting and sales) by taking business courses as electives,
declaring a business minor, or during part-time employment.
20 Teaching of Psychology 45(1)

Table 1. Subareas of Employment in Business and Specific Jobs Within These Subareas.

Management Sales Finance Advertising/Marketing/Public Relations

Assistant bank manager Real estate agent Assistant bank manager Advertising sales representative
Department manager Real estate broker Financial advisor Customer service representative
Customer service representative supervisor Retail salesperson Fund raiser Market research analyst
Claims supervisor Sales representative Loan counselor Media buyer
General operations manager Pharmaceutical salesperson Loan officer Public relations representative
Loss prevention manager Purchasing agent
Management analyst
Medical and health services manager
Training and development manager
Training and development specialist

Table 2. Knowledge, Skills, and Characteristics Needed for Jobs in needs of those who receive health care; creation and delivery
Business. of health promotion strategies; and the management of health-
care services or facilities. Others employed in health care are
Knowledge Skills Characteristics
involved with legal issues, deal with medical information and
The English language— Active listening— Dependability—92% records, or sell medical services or products.
100% 100% Integrity—88%
Customer and personal Speaking—88% Attention to
service—96% Reading detail—71% Teaching
Administration and comprehension— Cooperation—50% Merriam-Webster (n.d.) uses a circular definition to define
management—67% 54% Initiative—38%
teaching by saying it is the “act, practice, or profession of a
Sales and marketing— Critical thinking—54% Persistence—33%
46% teacher.” A more informative—and certainly more student-cen-
Mathematics—33% tered—way to define this occupation is to focus on its outcomes
by indicating that teachers are those who help others acquire and
Note. Each knowledge, skill, and characteristic is followed by the percentage of strengthen the KSCs they will need to succeed in important
the occupations contained in Occupational Information Network (O*NET) in
which it was rated as either very important or extremely important by pro- components of their personal and professional lives. The teach-
fessional job analysts and those employed in those occupations. The O*NET ing jobs that psychology majors can prepare to enter fall into two
term for characteristics is work styles. For definitions of O*NET types of subareas: those that involve teaching students with and without
knowledge, go to https://www.onetonline.org/find/descriptor/browse/Knowl- special needs. Psychology majors can equip themselves with
edge/; for definitions of O*NET skills, go to https://www.onetonline.org/find/
descriptor/browse/Skills/; for definitions of O*NET work styles, go to https:// many of the KSCs important for success in teaching (e.g., psy-
www.onetonline.org/find/descriptor/browse/Work_Styles/ chology, learning strategies, active listening, and instructing)
from both their classes (e.g., learning, cognition, and counseling)
and their extracurricular opportunities (e.g., serving as a teaching
Human Resources assistant or peer advisor). The challenge that psychology majors
According to Merriam-Webster (n.d.), human resources refers to face if they wish to enter the teaching profession is the necessity
“the activities within an organization that deal with the people of obtaining official certification in a particular field of teaching,
who work for that organization,” including recruiting, hiring, and which is not an outcome of traditional undergraduate psychology
terminating them; ensuring they are aware of and receive their programs. However, there are alternative-route-to-teaching cer-
appropriate pay and benefits; providing them with appropriate tification programs that enable those with bachelor’s degrees in
training; creating a just, equitable, healthy, and safe environment areas other than education to begin a supervised, paid teaching
in which they can work; and coordinating or managing these internship that results in official certification, which are readily
activities. There are 11 jobs in human resources for which stu- available as attested by the following information from Teach
dents can prepare with a bachelor’s degree in psychology, and ing-Certification.com (n.d., para. 4).
these jobs can be divided into the following four subareas: recruit-
ment and benefits, training, work environment, and management. As of 2010, 48 states and the District of Columbia have some
alternate route to teacher certification. These alternative routes to
teacher certification allow individuals with at least bachelor’s
Health Care degrees to teach without necessarily going through a college’s
Merriam-Webster (n.d.) defines health care as efforts made to campus-based teacher education program.
“maintain or restore physical, mental, or emotional well-
being.” Most jobs available to psychology majors in health care
Social Service
fall into four categories: delivery of direct physical or psycho- Merrian-Webster.com (n.d.) defines social service as an
logical care; support for the social, emotional, or resource “activity designed to promote social well-being.” Those
Appleby
Table 3. The 30 Most Important Types of Knowledge, Skills, and Characteristics Needed by College Graduates to Succeed in the 21st-Century
Workplace.
Knowledge Skills
1. The English language—39% 11.
2. Customer and personal service—28% 12.
3. Education and training—14% 13.
4. Mathematics—12% 14.
5. Computers and electronics—12% 15.
6. Psychology—9% 16.
7. Administration and management—7% 17.
8. Law and government—7% 18.
9. Public safety and security—5% 19.
10. Clerical—3% 20.
Note. Each knowledge, skill, and characteristic is followed by the percentage of the 536 occupations contained in O*NET that require at least a vocational or
associate’s degree in which it was rated as either very important or extremely important by professional job analysts and those employed in those occupations.
employed in this field do their best to promote the welfare of
individuals, families, groups, and communities by promoting
social justice, collective responsibility, and the benefits of
diversity. Their goals are to promote positive social change
by helping individuals escape or avoid abuse and oppression
and assisting groups through socioeconomic development and
grassroots empowerment. The jobs available to psychology
majors in social service fall into two categories: those that
involve the delivery services to individuals and those that
involve the delivery of services to groups.
Other Broad Occupational Areas in Which
Few Bachelor’s-Level Psychology Majors
Report They Are Employed, But Whose
KSCs Can Qualify Them to Enter
Appleby (2016b) reported seven other broad occupational
areas that contain a total of 62 jobs for which psychology
majors can prepare with a bachelor’s degree. These include
children and families; counseling; law and law enforce-
ment; the military; religion and spirituality; sport, fitness,
and recreation; technology; therapy; and other (a category
that contains jobs that do not fit into any of the other
fields). The difference between these and the five occupa-
tional fields identified in the previous section is that they
are not areas in which substantial numbers of bachelor’s-
level psychology majors report they have found employ-
ment. Faculty should make their advisees aware of this fact
but should be careful not present it—nor salary level—as
the only or most important criterion during the career
choice process. Choosing an occupation is not just about
salary (Carnevale et al., 2015) or the number of others with
a similar major employed in it. It should be about advisees’
interests, competencies, lifestyle preferences, values, and
passions (e.g., having a positive “impact on the well-
being of others,” Rajecki & Borden, 2011, p. 333). It
should be about helping advisees choose occupations that
will cause them to wake up in the morning with a strong
21
Characteristics
Speaking—37% 21. Dependability—97%
Active listening—33% 22. Attention to detail—95%
Critical thinking—28% 23. Integrity—88%
Reading comprehension—28% 24. Initiative—77%
Writing—12% 25. Cooperation—75%
Social perceptiveness—10% 26. Self-control—62%
Judgment and decision-making—8% 27. Stress tolerance—60%
Monitoring/assessment—6% 28. Adaptability/flexibility—60%
Complex problem-solving—6% 29. Analytical thinking—59%
Time management—1% 30. Persistence—59%
desire to go to work and to come home at night with a
genuine sense of satisfaction gained from having accom-
plished professionally challenging and personally worth-
while tasks. Given that the mission of APA is “to
advance the creation, communication and application of
psychological knowledge to benefit society and improve
people’s lives” (APA, n.d., p. 1), it makes sense that many
who choose to major in psychology are motivated more by
humanitarian than materialistic values. It also makes sense
from a broad societal point of view that we should encour-
age more psychology majors to prepare for careers involv-
ing children, families, law enforcement, fitness,
technology, and the military where psychology’s combina-
tion of scientific thinking and humanistic values could be
put to good use to “benefit society and improve human
lives” (p. 1).
But why do few psychology majors enter these career
fields? Is it because their undergraduate education did not
provide them with the opportunities to acquire the KSCs
these fields require, or is it because no one brought these
careers to their attention as legitimate occupational options?
I firmly believe the answer to the first of these questions is
no, and the answer to the second question is yes. I am in
agreement with Hettich and Landrum (2014, p. 21) who are
proponents of a career-advising approach that provides a
“full view of the playing field” by presenting a broad spec-
trum of career possibilities to psychology majors so they
have “a wide view of the potentialities.” Even Rajecki—
who was a persistent and articulate critic of this
approach—mitigated his criticism by stating that a “virtue
of widely inclusive lists is that they acknowledge the diver-
sity among students’ aptitudes, motivation, and personal
contingencies. Further, some entry-level jobs can provide
a stepping stone into positions having a closer match with
educational attainments” (2008, p. 36).
Psychology faculty can help psychology majors prepare for
currently less-often-entered careers by providing them with the
information in Table 3, which contains the KSCs that are most
important for success in all the 536 occupations contained in
22
O*NET that require at least vocational or associate’s degrees
(Burrus, Jackson, Xi, & Steinberg, 2013). Although this may
initially appear to be overly generic approach to career advis-
ing, it is certainly a prudent strategy to help undecided or
indecisive (Gordon, 2006) psychology majors to prepare for
the job market they will eventually be compelled to enter. A
very encouraging finding of this study for our discipline is that
psychological knowledge—defined by O*NET as knowledge
of human behavior and performance; individual differences in
ability, personality, and interests; learning and motivation; psy-
chological research methods; and the assessment and treatment
of behavioral and affective disorders—was ranked as the sixth
most important knowledge domain across all 536 occupations
contained in O*NET that require at least a vocational or associ-
ate’s degree and the fourth most important knowledge domain
for the 126 occupations that require extensive preparation (e.g.,
an MBA, PhD, MD, or JD), such as management analyst,
audiologist, physician, or judge. These are facts that faculty
will be pleased to provide—and their advisees will be equally
pleased to receive—during career-advising sessions, especially
by those students who are unsure of the relevance of their major
to careers whose titles do not include the word psychology and
whose career-development plans require a degree beyond the
bachelor’s. They are also the facts that caused the Director of
APA’s Center for Workforce Studies to say, "These results
corroborate CWS’s work on what people do with their psychol-
ogy degrees and occupations for psychology bachelor’s degree
holders. Psychology is versatile at all degree levels" (K.
Stamm, personal communcation, October 24, 2017). These
data also suggest that, as occupations increase in their need for
higher levels of competence, a knowledge of psychology
becomes increasingly more crucial for the success of those
employed in these occupations.
Conclusions and Future Directions
We have come a long way since the publication of the 1952
Cornell Conference Report. Perhaps the most important deci-
sion we have reached during this 66-year journey is our
acknowledgment of the fact that we are just as responsible
for the professional success of our students who end their
formal education with a bachelor’s degree as we are for those
who choose the same academic and professional path we did.
To achieve this commendable goal, we have created a wealth
of strategies and resources to help our job-seeking students
achieve their postbaccalaureate aspirations and shared them
with our colleagues in a variety of venues (e.g., Teaching of
Psychology, Eye on Psi Chi, Division 2’s Office of Teaching
Resources and e-books, APA’s Psych Learning Curve blog,
and national and regional conferences on the teaching of psy-
chology). APA’s newly formed Committee on Associate and
Baccalaureate Education is currently sponsoring projects that
will produce strategies to deliver career-advising information
to both students and faculty in new and creative ways (e.g.,
academic advising posters and online resources such as a list
Teaching of Psychology 45(1)
of the most highly valued job skills that psychology majors
can develop).
When APA convenes the task force for its next mandated
review of the Guidelines, I hope its members find the informa-
tion I have provided in this article helpful when they strive to
continue to improve the quality of the services and resources
we provide to the majority of our majors who use their bache-
lor’s degrees to prepare themselves to enter the workforce.
Perhaps they can use this information to expand Outcome 5.5
of Goal 5: Professional Development of the current Guidelines
by including words such as those added in italics to the two
following previously quoted outcomes of this goal to “optimize
the competitiveness of their graduates for securing places in the
workforce” (APA, 2013, p. 16).
Develop meaningful professional direction for life after graduation
by making them aware of the settings in which people with back-
grounds in psychology have been employed in the past and can be
employed in the future and the sets of knowledge, skills, and char-
acteristics desired by employers who hire or select people with
psychology backgrounds.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to
the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.
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