Hi, could you please tell me what your name is, how old you are and what you do as a job? Hi, my name is Jordan. I'm 29 years old and I work as a registered psychologist. Awesome. So what is your role and responsibilities do you have in your job? As a psychologist, there's a bunch of things that I do as part of my day today. The two main areas are counselling. So sitting in the room, really stereotypical thing like what you might see on a movie, where I might work with a client, or a group of people to help them understand what's going on, presenting problem, and trying to help them make a plan to move forward through that. So counselling is one thing and then the other main part of my role would be doing assessments, where I might test cognitive abilities, so things like attention, memory, in young people and adults. And I also run groups, and there's also a lot of boring stuff attached alongside that as well. Like what's the paperwork and admin that kind of thing too? So how long have you been in your current job? So currently I've been in it for six months, but so I work in private practice at the moment. And I've worked in a bunch of areas in psychology for this. So that's one of the things I love about the industry. So I've worked in schools before, working with young people. I've worked in the use justice system, so like a prison with young people. And I've worked with industry, so working with the AFP, the department of defense as well. Awesome. So is this your first job? What did you do before and did you change? So in psychology, it's not my first job. As I've mentioned, I've worked in a school, a youth justice center for a private company. Before I was working as a psychologist, I had to study, so I had to work while I was studying. So I originally worked at KFC with my first job. And before I started working as a psychologist, I had through uni. I also worked at Target. Awesome. So what subjects did you do at high school? Why did you choose them? Did they link to what you wanted to do? So in my VCE, I did a range of subjects. So I did music. I did visual communication, which I wasn't very good at. I'm not a very creative person, but I wasn't sure about what I wanted to do after school. I did psychology and maths and English. Do you have to do any extra study once you left school to become a psychologist? What study did you do? Yes, so you definitely need to do further study after high school to become a psychologist. I did my bachelor degree at university and then after that I had to do an honours degree to get registered. Once you've done your honours degree, there is an option where you can go out and work in the field as a provisional psychologist, which is like a trainee psychologist. And I had to do that for a couple of years and pass the National Psychology exam, do a lot of assessments to get registered. And then after I've done that internship, now I'm a registered psychologist and can work by myself. So what's the qualification that you have for your job and how did you get that qualification? So I got a Bachelor of Psychological Studies honours, so I went to university to do that. And it took me five years. You can do it in four years, but most people it takes a little bit longer than that because it's quite full on. And how much can you earn in your job? So it really depends. When you first go out and work as a provisional psychologist because you're more on the lower end of all the beginning of your career, you might end up in that kind of 50 to $60,000 range. And it really can depend and vary from there. So private practice, when you're working for yourself, it can depend. You can charge upwards of $170 an hour. But if you're working for a big business, the salary might be between 80 and $100,000 a year. And is there a high employment opportunities in your field? It's quite a lot of work for psychologists. An important thing maybe to think about is that it's quite competitive to get into your honours degree. There's lots of people that want to get into those courses and there's not many places. So it's really competitive when you're studying. But once you're registered and you're out in the workforce, there's heaps of work out there. And the thing I love about psychology being a psychologist is that I can work in all of these different settings like a school or a prison or a clinic. And even though they're all really different and I love what are all different things about them. My role stays the same and all of those different settings. And how do you get your job? Where do you look to get a psychologist goal? So that's a good question. I've gotten jobs through a couple of ways as a psychologist. So some of them I've just found online through SEAK and of applied for in cotton, which I was fortunate to get through an interview process. However, my current job, I got because I'm friends with another psychologist that works there. And so when you become registered and start working in the field, you eventually over time start to me to get to know a lot of other psychologists in the area or in the field. And quite often when opportunities might come up, we might talk to each other and let each other know when there's a job that sounds really good. Awesome. What is hard about your job? So that's a good question too. So it's not an easy job being a psychologist. I wouldn't describe it as an easy job. But I think the main thing that I would think would be the most difficult would be as a psychologist, we spend all day, every day, basically hearing about some pretty tough things with our clients that can be pretty confronting at times. So I think the most difficult thing would be being able to manage our own mental health as a psychologist. And how we manage that is by having something called supervision. So I've got another psychologist that I go and check in with and we discussed difficult cases and that kind of thing. And another really hard thing as well is just keeping up with all the paperwork. What do you like about your job? I can't touch on this before but I do love the job very much. So whether I'm running a group in a prison working with violent offenders or drug and alcohol groups with young people as well, or whether I'm just working at a school with students that might be stressed about their studies or working in a clinic with people that's out in the workforce. And the thing I love about it is I get to meet people from all different walks of life that have different and varied backgrounds, get to know them and understand what's kind of happening and how we can help them. But on top of that, I get to go and be exposed to all of these really cool and interesting areas. But my role doesn't necessarily change at the end of the day. I'm just going to go and understand what the challenges of person might be facing and then learning and working with them to help get through those challenges. So that's what I love about it. And what traits would someone have to have to be in your job? So I mentioned before that it can be pretty tough and competitive to get into an honours degree. So I think it's important to be committed to your study for one and I'll be honest, I wasn't as committed to my study in high school as I should have been. But throughout university, I think that was where I learned that it's something I'm really passionate about and I wish I did focus a little bit more when I was in high school. So you need to be willing to study and be resilient and you also need to be compassionate. So what I mean by that is being able to make sure you're showing the person you're talking to that you care and that you're listening to them nonjudgmentally as well. And then my last question is, where can your job take you? Is there any travel opportunities? Is there fire positions that are available? Yeah, and there are. So you could, if you're working for a private company, you can move up and become a senior clinician or a senior psychologist. And that would involve me, you being a supervisor of other training or provisional psychologists. You can also be on that if you're interested in more business minded. You can start your own business or maybe you'd like to run your own clinic. So that means you would become a director of that clinic. So there's an opportunity there in regards to traveling, not really because the qualifications in each country differ for psychologists. So I'm only registered as a health practitioner and a psychologist in Australia. And that does not always carry over to other countries and it can be a very difficult process to get that done. Awesome. Thank you so much for talking with us today. No worries. Thanks for having me.