The Psychology Student's Career Survival Guide

Here Be Dragons

Alex Forsythe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000379648
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Berufsausbildung

The Psychology Student's Career Survival Guide is designed to aid students in identifying their ideal career pathway and imbue them with the right tools and skills to not only achieve their desired job but to progress and thrive within the workplace.

The first half of the book focuses on how to find and get a suitable job. The remaining chapters explore gaining success in the workplace in terms of personal growth, navigating criticism, workplace relations and the critical job assignments that every graduate should pursue. Forsythe, an experienced organisational psychologist, helps students recognise and apply the acquired psychological skill set to develop a personal brand, increase personal visibility and develop professional networks. This smooths the transition from university into the world of work by developing effective working practices that will support personal performance and that of the workplace. This book can also serve as a practical guide for academics looking to bridge the gap between the developing student at university and demands of their future employers. It explicitly calls for vocational elements such as communication, team-working, goal setting and planning within the curriculum.

This engaging book comes with an abundance of resources to support students' individual development and to help academics run workshops. These resources include tool kits which include self-diagnostic tools and strengths finders, networking skill development, job search strategies, difficult interview questions, personal branding and so on. This is an essential text for psychology students at all levels looking for employability guidance and for psychology academics who are seeking supportive resources and guidance on helping students achieve their career ambitions.

Chapter 1 Here be dragons

Millions of years ago (circa 1500) in a land far away (England and Europe), fear was just a part of life. The things feared the most included (but are not limited to):

• Purgatory
• Witches

• Plague
• The big bad wolf
• The living
• The dead
• The undead
• Fairies and elves
• Little girls with blond hair and a penchant for porridge
• Black cats
• Broken mirrors
• Horseshoes the wrong way up
• Horseshoes the right way up
• The colour black
• The colour orange
• The colour orange masquerading as ‘the new black’
• Sea monsters
• Mermaids

But the most ferocious fear was the fear of dragons. Dragons were the most particularly scary thing about life and without proper management had a bad habit of creating a human barbecue. Since humans don’t like to be barbecued, they went about adding warnings to maps so as to discourage sailors and travellers away from anything other than official trade routes. Areas they felt dragons were particularly hungry were marked here be dragons. It worked, yet much to the disappointment of many die-hard Game of Thrones fans, winter came, winter went, and the only wall that everyone spent time worrying about was the one being built by Donald Trump.

There are few things that people fear more than the unknown. There are no dragons or sea monsters that lie beyond the margins of our maps, but people will do just about anything to control the unknown, if not, in fact, avoid going there in the first place. As for yourself, do you want to be better, or do you want to be safer? Having ability means you have all the necessary raw resources to make things happen, but you also need to develop the will to make things happen for yourself, to put yourself out there, to commit in the face of obstacles and resistance. Call it ambition, grit, perseverance or resilience, you need the energy to propel yourself forward in the right direction. This chapter is designed to help students explore the numerous possibilities waiting to be discovered, because success is actually quite predictable (well, you can at least give yourself a better than random chance). Here we prepare students for the journey by helping them challenge what they may have accepted, to stay the course, to dig deep and think about what really matters.

“Psychology is the best degree you can study. I am slightly biased of course, but I genuinely believe you can craft a way of making it relevant to any job. What makes a good doctor? A: Bedside manner (how they relate to patients). What makes a good lawyer? A: One who gains their clients’ trust (how they relate to clients). What makes a good film director? A: One who creates a compelling film (they understand how to anticipate and engage their audience). There are a number of specialised masters degrees: sports psychology. Fine. Go work in the sports arena. Criminal psychology – OK – go work in prisons or with the police. Even my field (occupational) is over obsessed with psychometrics, recruitment and coaching – when the potential is far wider. What is taught is merely the tip of the iceberg. Will you be the next expert in creative psychology? Bitcoin psychology? Cinema psychology? Cyberpsychology? Robot psychology? In short, the potential is endless, but you need to have the sort of proactive mindset you’ll need to carve and create the jobs that I’d like to see being developed. Do not restrict yourself to the specialisms that already exist. Be bold, be brave and help create and develop the field”.

Lucy Standing, Vice-Chair for the Association of Business Psychology and Head of Strategies and Partnerships at Bravestarts.com

Knowing what we want is a rare psychological achievement

You don’t need a psychology degree to know that subtle and seemingly insignificant details influence the decisions you make. You’d have to be living under a rock not to have realised that social media and Hollywood culture have changed the way Western cultures view beauty and what a normal human should look like. Or that fake news has changed the course of global governance, reduced vaccination uptake and given legs to the flat earth debate. Whether you know it or not, we each have our own cognitive bias which feeds into the opinions we hold and the decisions we make, which in turn influences the subtleties of how we live our lives. Along with external pressures, these internal biases influence every aspect of our person. Call me a conspiracy theorist, but this potent combination can change the activities we pursue, our confidence about the grades we can achieve, the value we place on wealth or job titles, what we eat, what we drink, how much we really drink, our weight, relationships, where we go on holiday and of course the careers that we choose.

We live under the impression that we can do anything we want, have anything we want, be anything we want and all we have to do is do the right things and make the right choices and the rest will follow. Free will is of such great importance that it’s peppered across charters, treaties and declarations the world over, but what really is free choice? How do we find it? And what the hell do we do with it when we get it?

Freedom to choose, or rather the lack of it, set Emma Rosen¹ on a mission. Unimpressed with the limited choices on offer by her careers service and feeling as if she were being nudged down a few narrow paths, Emma wanted more because settling on your first career choice is rather like marrying your first boyfriend: romantic but stupid. Limiting prevents the exploration of diverse career experiences. Students need more time to properly explore all their options without being pushed into narrow career choices. In 2015, having completed her degree, Emma propelled herself into what she called ‘a radical sabbatical’: a mission to try 25 jobs before she reached the age of 25. Emma then proceeded to write a book about her misadventures, then became a journalist, writer and public speaker. Freud might dryly speculate that deep down, Emma always wanted to be a journalist and those 25 jobs were simply an outstanding propellant into the self-help book market.

Emma’s vision taps into what we psychologists call the sunk cost’ fallacy, and students of psychology are particularly prone to this fallacy of thinking. Having kept their career pathways largely open, our students often find it difficult to settle on ‘what next’. We are so poor at predicting what will make us happy, the more choice we have, the more likely we are to become paralyzed by our choices. Keeping options open can seem like the safest choice; no decision = no embarrassment, no ridicule, no reduction in self-worth and, most importantly, no failure. But then there are those nagging worries about all that debt. Pressure builds action, any action; even a bad action seems like a good idea.2

If free choice is something of a barrier to finding meaningful work, so is too narrow a focus. Humans have a unique propensity to keep doing an activity that is failing to meet their needs: staying until the end of an abysmal movie; finishing a terrible meal; keeping hold of clothes that don’t fit or clothes that have never been worn or, worse still, continuing to invest time, emotions and money in something that should have been abandoned a long time ago (like bad relationships, and no, it will not get any better no matter what you do). From the outside looking in, we can see the mistakes of others ‘the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome’ (said Albert Einstein never), but don’t we all have our own pair of ambition jeans tucked away somewhere for the day we magically drop two dress sizes?

Making a career decision is complex and can cause much anxiety and mental distress,³ so finding a ‘good’ reason to procrastinate is a useful coping strategy. The challenge then becomes that, when a choice is finally made, we may end up feeling dissatisfied with that choice. That choice requires us to give up on other things that also had very attractive features, which, maybe in that alternate universe out there, are making us very happy with stars, unicorns and mermaids. In other words, lots of choice brings lots of expectations, which produces lower levels of satisfaction; even if the results of those choices are good, people still feel dissatisfied because the grass always seems greener when you can’t cross the fence. To overcome this mental spaghetti, we need to develop more self-understanding and awareness, better self-talk and self-control. One way to develop these skills is to embrace ambiguity as a window for learning, self-development and career exploration.

Managing ambiguity

Managing ambiguity is critical both for enjoying the legend that is Dr Seuss and for career progression, but some of us have a natural tendency to be better at this than others. Some people thrive when they are expected to make decisions based on incomplete information, cope with uncertainty or risk and adapt to change. Others find ambiguity intolerable. Ambiguity increases anxiety, rumination and even depression, and those who have a low tolerance for it will continually seek out certainty.⁴ Having low tolerance for ambiguity means that you are far more likely to perceive situations as threatening and anxiety provoking rather than as promising opportunities. As anxiety increases, we are more likely to seek out additional information which might give more certainty in a problem. In the short term, certainty-seeking behaviour is rewarding; your brain detects a problem, something that is to be avoided, and it steers you away from the threat. However, the downside is that our tolerance for uncertainty decreases and we develop habits and routines built on predictability, see patterns that do not exist, blame others for not providing the necessary information to complete tasks and compartmentalise or silo tasks that should be synergistic. We are then less likely to explore a spectrum of possibilities that would forge new paths and solutions for people.

Self in focus

Think of a time when you had an assignment to complete. Have you ever felt that your lecturer did not give you all the information you needed to perform the task? How did that make you feel? What certainty-seeking behaviours did those thought processes trigger? And how helpful were they?

Test the ‘null hypothesis’. Look for independent information that sufficient information was supplied. For example, was this an assignment which had been used to test previous cohorts of students? If it was used in the past, then it would be unusual for the lecturer not to have provided all the information that would be critical. Talk to other students in your tutorials about how they found the assignment.

Calm your inner chatter

• The need for certainty will almost certainly change depending on the situation. Learn to know when you need more certainty in your life and monitor your certainty-seeking behaviour by keeping a record of your mood and behaviours. Note when you are craving more certainty in your life and the behaviours triggered. What were the responses to those behaviours?
• Apps such as Headspace (www.headspace.com/) can help you manage ‘inner chatter’, relax and engage more with the uncertainties of life.

Remove the stick from your bum

• Do not always choose news that fits your views. There is profound value in reading information that you disagree with, because it develops your perspective by providing new knowledge and understanding. For example, join a network social media group that you fundamentally disagree with (political parties you would never vote for, lifestyles you would never want to live – the flat earth society is one of my favourites – pro-life, pro-choice, gun ownership). Thanks to social media and the internet, you can comfortably and safely walk a mile in someone else’s shoes (or jackboots). It’s not necessary to shave your head, don the aforementioned boots and have a swastika tattooed on your forehead – and it’s a lot safer not to – but you can listen to or read viewpoints from that side of the road which you would normally never venture to.

Engaging with ambiguity helps us make better decisions and become more creative. People who are able to tolerate ambiguity are much more likely to cooperate with and trust other people; they foster high levels of prosocial behaviour, including the prioritisation of the welfare of others.⁵ This makes people who can tolerate ambiguity better employees than those who avoid risk and continually seek certainty.⁶ Tolerant individuals cope with organisational change and are more creative; they are content to work with unconventional people, are self-starters and avoid at all costs what is known as satisficing.⁷ Rather than holding back, gathering information and postponing decision-making u...