Identifying job roles for psychology 3-year graduates: A discussion-based workshop

Specific job roles for 3-year psychology graduates can be opaque to students, graduates, employers and tertiary educators. This workshop will focus on identifying and discussing potential job roles for psychology 3-year graduates that fall outside typically cited employment opportunities. We will briefly describe our recent machine learning project in which we used attributes of psychology graduates to train an algorithm to sort and identify suitable job advertisements. The findings of this project, namely breadth and depth of roles, industry categories, and spatial and temporal trends in jobs, will be presented. Workshop participants will be provided with a variety of real-world job advertisements identified by this algorithm, as prompts for determining 3-year graduate job roles. The aim of the workshop is to facilitate discussion as to the core skills and attributes of 3-year degree graduates and their application in employment. The recognition of variation in graduate personal and contextual factors, and their role in employment decision-making will also be highlighted. The workshop will also encompass different ways our graduates can potentially contribute to society through employment options. Mechanisms by which the tertiary sector can support the transition to a wide range of job roles will be discussed.