Demand for Australia’s Psychology Graduates

Understanding Industry Demand for Australia’s Psychology Graduates

A collaboration between the University of Canberra and the Australian National University

Three-year psychology degree graduates hold a broad range of skills and knowledge, but the sheer breadth of potential applications of these attributes in the workforce, paired with existing assumptions of both graduates and employers about a narrow ‘psychologist’ job pathway, means that career paths are currently vague for three-year psychology graduates. This impacts students and graduates, but also potential employers, as well as tertiary education.

In this project we are exploring the employment opportunities for psychology graduates using a ‘big data’ approach, specifically Machine Learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP). Our multidisciplinary team has developed a ML/NLP algorithm that was applied to a dataset of 5.1 million job ads, allowing us to map industry demand for psychology graduates’ skills for the first time, and provide detailed identification of potential job roles for psychology graduates. This approach uses competency matching to identify where graduates’ skills and knowledge can place them within industry (i.e., where can graduates work?), hence avoiding reliance on historical data (i.e., where have graduates worked in the past?) or keyword search (i.e., only ads including the term ‘psychology’).

Suggested citation: Busby Grant, J., George, A., Suominen, H. Grant, W., Xu, C. & Mewburn, I. (2024). Understanding industry demand for Australia’s psychology graduates. https://www.canberra.edu.au/about-uc/faculties/health/research/demand-for-australias-psychology-graduates

Presentation of the project and discussion of the implications by Dr Janie Busby Grant and Associate Professor Amanda George at the Australian Psychological Society Psychology Education Interest Group Roundtable (March, 2024)

Contact

For further details please contact Dr Janie Busby Grant (Janie.BusbyGrant@canberra.edu.au) or Assoc Prof Amanda George (Amanda.George@canberra.edu.au).