Right. I’ve decided to try and get my brain working again so am thinking of doing an Open University degree.
Following recent life changing events I have decided a psychology degree would be my choice.
Has someone here got one?
I’m 42 now so would be 45/46 when I graduate.
What jobs would be available to me at that age?

A guy I know has a psychology degree. Works in Hr, but wants to be a plumber.

What makes you want to do that? 😉

Massive shortage of educational psychologists in Scotland at least.

There are a few different psychology disciplines, so my initial response is to ask you if you know what you might like to do? In a broad sense would be good for now if you’re unsure of specifics.

For example, working with people and in what context?

Mrs Slack has a Psychology degree from Southampton Uni, which apparently is one of the better faculties to study and I’m not sure how the OU degree is regarded. Lots of written and numeric work involved and lots of statistical analysis and evaluation.

I have a degree in it.

I have never used it professionally – I did it for interest not a career.

When I graduated a degree alone was not enough to do a client facing psychologist job usually. Most will require a masters and clinical work is a further 3 year working phd. The entrance process for which was incredibly competitive back in the early noughties, which is when I last have any knowledge and socialised with a number of trainee clinical psychologists. Most had a masters and paid or unpaid volunteer counselling work behind them before applying and many had to apply at least twice before getting accepted. Things may have changed though…

Other jobs/ fields I can think of

Health
Sport
Educational
Research work (loads of different fields)
Ergonomics

Don’t let that put you off though just be prepared to do more than just a degree of you want to work in the client facing field.

iolo it’s one of the most popular degree courses these days I think. It gives quite a good grounding in many areas as you need to be able to write well constructed reports, understand and question the stats behind results and do all the background research to support your arguments. All good transferrable skills for employers. If you actually want to stay in psychology its a lot tougher as you’ll need to do additional qualifications, probably work ad an intern etc etc to get anywhere.

I started out doing a post grad conversion diploma in psychology, a 2 year course. I went into it with no strong specific career intentions, instead i wanted to see what caught my interest. I got great marks for my work, but after the first year I talked myself out of carrying on. Perversely that was partly because my own mental health was on the slide again and I couldn’t believe I’d get anywhere.

it’s one of the most popular degree courses these days I think.

It always was very popular. It also had a very high drop out rate when I was at uni. Lots of folk did it in first year then ditched it, perhaps when they found out it wasn’t going to unlock the secrets of the mind or help them pull.

I have an BSc and MSc in psychology. I started it as it sounded interesting became disillusioned with the career choices. A day in wormwood scrubs with a prison psychologist didn’t help! IMO its regarded as many as a pseudo science….if you want it to lead you to a particular role then be sure that is what you want to do…..

I have a bsc in psychology from Liverpool uni, went into it with the plan of getting into clinical psych eventually. As mentioned earlier, to actually practise requires a lot more than a degree! One of my year is now a practising clinical psychologist and she’s had to do a lot of “volunteer” (read “free”) work as well as an msc and I think she’s having to do a PhD to get any serious progression.

Personally, I did several months work as a nurse in a mid security hospital and decided it wasn’t for me – the psychs seemed to spend very little face to face time with the patients and the treatment plans were generic. Got quite depressed about it for a while!

However, the degree itself was useful, lots of work around understanding the scientific method, statistics and analysis and also report writing which have all been really useful in career.

Very few jobs without further study

I got a First Class Bsc in Pyschology from Manchester Uni in the 90s. I’ve never used it for anything other than chatting in the pub. I’m a programmer now.

I only ended up on it as I switched from Electrical and Electronic engineering at UMIST. Went from 35 hours a week with 100 blokes and 10 women to 7 hours a week with 100 women and 15 blokes – result.

It’s really easy if you have any sort of maths/scientific background as most other people on the course won’t. There are a LOT of statistics involved, which are just dull.

I’d advise against it – not much useful/well paid work and a lot of people doing it.

Occupational Psychology is a field that hasn’t been mentioned, jobs in this field will require an MSc + Chartership (via British Psychological Society, also career info from them here: BPS Careers)

Also on Ergonomics, which is also known as Human Factors. From what I have seen it’s a bit more of psychology plus engineering, e.g. predicting how people will behave in an evacution of a building or the best way to lay out controls in a military helicopter….. or the monitor on someone’s desk!

My uncle has a degree in psychology. Apart from having a relatively successful private practice, he also consults with most of the major TV production companies to provide candidate profiling, selection and support for reality TV shows (he’s a world expert in profiling).

That has proven to be pretty interesting work by all accounts though I’m not sure it’s a line of trade open to many (he also has a PhD and is based in San Diego so has a lot of LA based clients as well as being a world expert on the subject).

Also bear in mind, to do it (an OU degree) in 3 to 4 years that will be virtually full time study.
If only part time you will be looking at more like 6 years and graduating nearer to 50!

There’s some folk in my work with psychology degrees. They do “human factors engineering” type stuff. Optimising interaction of man and machine and stuff like that, minimise errors through design.

Massive field. It’s like saying, ‘I’m interested in human, animal, machine, systems and software behaviour….is there a job at the end?’ 😉

There’s plenty more study and work experience to be done before you can turn a psychology degree into a congruent career….

It can be pretty interesting at times. And it keeps the wolf from the door I guess. But be prepared for a fairly long haul if you want to work clinically. There are graduate clinical jobs, but they tend to be massively oversubscribed by a bottleneck of people trying to get onto further degree courses. I don’t know much about non-clinical areas of psychology work btw, so take the above as coming from that context.

I have a degree in it and I work in a pub.

I did several courses of the OU Psychology degree, but then they quadrupled the price virtually over night.
What I did was ok, but they have a heavy focus on social psychology I found (was a few years ago mind). But although I have an interest in the subject, for what it costs now doing it because you’re just interested makes it an extremely expensive hobby.

Courses I was on were dominated by women, the most common motivation seems to be a career in some kind of counselling. It struck me that many consider it a soft option, it is very popular, and the queues for counselling courses are long.

I still read plenty on the subject, but I prefer to keep it as close to ‘science’ as possible, not whimsical subjective theory, which the subject is prone to.

Also as has been said, it will take you closer to 6 years to complete.

The psychologist I’m seeing seems to be roughly as messed up as me, the difference being she’s channelled it into overachievement whereas I ran away and got drunk. She’s wonderful, but I’m not at all sure she’s happy..

I am actually really interested in councelling and mental health issues.
I have a lot of experience in both (receiving and suffering from) therefore would like to possibly use this to help others.
And it would be something to keep my mind occupied.
I already have a civil engineering degree so maths and statistics aren’t a problem.

If its counselling you want to do then forget doing a psychology degree. These days to practise in the UK you need a recognised counselling qualification from British Association of Counselling and Psychotherapy. Mrs uponthedowns is currently doing this. You will need to find ways of getting practical experience. My missus is doing grief counselling for a hospice.

http://www.open.ac.uk/courses/qualifications/q84

This is what I’m really interested in.
I think it will help me better than just a straightforward psychology degree.

If you book 6 sessions with me we can discuss your desire to do a psychology degree over the next few weeks.

Is there some sort of conversion after the degree to then become a psychologist? My wife did HR and Psychology but she said the psych part was low level pop stuff and not that useful.

Know a few people with psychology degrees, none of them work in psychology. Most of them have pretty crap jobs tbh.

(said the cab driver with a masters in town planning…..)

Surely this forum would provide a plethora of opportunities for research or a thesis in psych! 😀 For instance, what motivates the trolls? The possibilities are endless.

Maybe some counseling could could be offered to the people that spend too much time on here. Could be part of the Premier package.

Hora alone could keep a large staff of psychologists busy full time. And they in turn would need support from other psychologists to enable them to cope and be able to function in the real world again. 🙂

OP – in all seriousness, there are lots of people out there with psych degrees; way more than jobs available. But don’t let that deter you if it is really something that you want to do and think that you would be good at!

I have a Psychology degree, graduated 10 years ago and now work in HR. I’m doing a Masters in Occupational Psychology, which is kind of like applying science to the more interesting parts of HR and ignoring the dull regulatory bits. Once I’ve finished I’ll either stay in HR and try and move into more interesting projects based work or go consulting.

Psychology is fairly well regarded by employers in that it’s viewed as a science and you’ll have good numerical and critical thinking skills, but an undergraduate degree alone doesn’t open any doors that any other non-vocational subject wouldn’t.

Mrs bol did one, and went on to train as a clinical psychologist and clinical neuro psychologist. The psychology degree is good on its own, but won’t get you a clinical job, other than as an assistant psychologist. Assistants get to do a lot of interesting stuff, and get paid £20k+, but you’d then need to train for a further 3 years to be a clinical psychologist. The CP courses are very competitive to get on. You need to make sure the initial degree you choose is eligible (lots aren’t), and get at least a 2.1.

After all that, you will earn about half as much as a medic with a similar length of training, but be regarded as over paid by nursing colleagues and managers. Not entirely sure she’d recommend it as an option.

The BACP are just one of the better known counselling organisation’s in the UK.
Pretty sure it’s a 4 yr part time course, that requires lots and lots practical experience.

To be fair – there are other organisation’s who hand out counselling certificates. Counselling is pretty unregulated.

Psychology degrees sound impressive. But appear to be as useless as a criminology degree in getting a related job out of.

The government is bringing in regulation for counselling which will mean that you will essentially require a BACP qualification to practise hence my misses doing it despite having another qualification from Glasgow uni. However her current qualification and experience means she’s doing the BACP course in 18 months.

My Daughter passed hers in 2013 and now works as a teaching assistant at a school for the disabled.
She has an option to do a full year at uni or 3 years on the job to fully qualify as a teacher.

If you book 6 sessions with me we can discuss your desire to do a psychology degree over the next few weeks.

🙂