Competition for available jobs is keen.
Salaries vary with employer, location, and applicant's experience.
Recent surveys report that between 30 and 40 percent of psychology majors go on to graduate school in psychology or allied disciplines in order to achieve the applied skills and specialized knowledge necessary for many jobs in the human service fields. Graduate training is strongly recommended. Because psychology tends to be confused with psychiatry, a medical specialty, many people erroneously assume that psychologists concern themselves primarily with psychopathology and deviant behavior. The concerns of psychology are considerably more diverse. Psychology began simply as a philosophical approach to understanding behavior and developed in the laboratory as a scientific approach toward the same goal.