According to Professor Charles Brewer of Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina, the advantage of a Psychology degree is that it provides the flexibility and adaptability to enable you to have a successful career in “almost anything you can name”.

While many of you will want to follow the traditional path to becoming a registered Psychologist (involving a 4^th year and a Masters degree or internship), what about options for those of you who are a little less sure of where you want to go? What if you don’t want to be a Psychologist, yet you love the idea of understanding how the mind works? Is it still worth doing a Psychology degree?

Well, the answer is a clear YES. Psychology degrees lead to many job options because in Psychology you study people and what makes them tick. Psychology includes how a child develops into an adult, how personality and differences between individuals affect us, how our brain works, how we deal with emotions and how we motivate ourselves and others. It also looks at how we learn, the differences between cultures, and how we interact with other people, as well as the more traditional topic of understanding how psychological disorders affect people.

While you are learning all this, you are also taught to think critically and creatively, and to understand how we solve problems and find information (research). You will be learning how people communicate and how to communicate effectively yourself. Do these sound like skills that would help you get any job? Well, they are.

If you do some research (one of those useful skills you will learn in a Psychology degree), you will soon discover that what employers want is a graduate. You might think they want a graduate with a specific degree, but that is often not the case. It is true that if you want to work as a computer programmer, you will need to study programming, and if you want to work as an accountant, you will need to study accounting. But for many, many other jobs, the employers are looking for graduates

• "from all disciplines; talented and well-rounded people" (KPMG Australia)
• "who have exceptional interpersonal skills that can bridge cultural differences” (Australian Secret Intelligence Service)
• "who respond quickly to changing issues and situations" (Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade)
• "who have excellent analytical…and problem solving skills" (Defence Intelligence Organisation)
• "demonstrate and articulate sound clinical knowledge and reasoning, critical thinking, judgment and decision makin" (National Healthcare Group)  

A quick look around a website such as the Graduate Opportunities website (www.graduateopportunities.com) will show you that the skills you would develop while studying for a Bachelor of Science in Psychology at UC are exactly what many employers are looking for. 

Yet, you still might be asking, what exactly would I do when I graduate? What would my job be? According to Graduate Careers Australia (www.graduatecareers.com.au), some areas you might work in after graduating with a Psychology degree are

• Psychologist or clinical psychologist (diagnosing and treating mental health problems)
• Assessment, intervention, counselling (counsellor or crisis counsellor)
• Creating social change to improve conditions for people or prevent problems
• Promoting the prevention and treatment of illnesses
• Law, criminal profiling, crime statistics research, police services, and correctional services
• Accident prevention and human factors research
• Sport and exercise performance
• Designing government policy and programs
• Researching how people function in different environments or situations
• Assisting organisations to function better
• Human resource management
• Market research and advertising
• Research or teaching at universities
• Welfare and community projects

So, as you can see from this overview of Psychology, learning about people and what makes them tick opens up a lot of doors as a job seeker. The skills you gain during a Psychology degree will always be useful. It doesn’t matter where you want to go in your working life, you can’t go wrong with a Psychology degree from UC