Job Hunt/COMPETENCE concern

[jadezomb]

Hello all,

I am considering applying to a job in a new setting with a new-ish age group. I want to expand my horizons a bit and branch out. But...I want to be sure I am practicing within my competence and practicing ethically. Would ongoing supervision or consultation, and seeking out CEs and extra reading really be enough? For example, hypothetically let's say that I have had experience in residential and outpatient settings with adults, and this would be an inpatient setting with children and adolescents. Perhaps in the past I would have seen a few children and adolescents but it was not the bulk of my work. What can I do, or what would I need to make sure my employer had in place so I could be successful? Or should I integrate new populations into my repertoire more slowly than jumping into a new setting?

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[WisNeuro]

This really depends on what you want to do. For example, if you are trained as an adult neuropsychologist, and decided you wanted to do peds, doing some readings and getting some supervision would be inadequate, at best. If I saw this happening, I would think this would be a reportable offense to the state board. Now, say you have a good grounding in psychotherapy, like CBT/PE/etc and have worked mostly with adults, and you want to see some adolescents here and there. Then yeah, just getting some extra supervision and some CEs would probably suffice. It really depends on what level of training you are trying to bridge here.

 

[jadezomb]

Thank you for your response! I think that the fact I even needed to ask spoke to how large a leap it was. There are probably better ways to learn and grow without jumping into something completely new. Probably just having some end-of-postdoc anxiety over here of...what now? Plus, there is so much more I still have to learn!

 

[deleted343839]

For example, hypothetically let's say that I have had experience in residential and outpatient settings with adults, and this would be an inpatient setting with children and adolescents. Perhaps in the past I would have seen a few children and adolescents but it was not the bulk of my work. What can I do, or what would I need to make sure my employer had in place so I could be successful?

A competency gap of this magnitude is not the employer's responsibility to manage. The employer should be looking for candidates who already have knowledge, skills, and experience relevant to the position. People do move into new areas, but usually within the same area/specialty (or from specialty to generalist settings). My work is in adult clinical health psychology, and frankly I would be alarmed by any employer who thought I could transition readily into, say, an inpatient child and adolescent psychiatric setting. A more feasible move would be to transition to another setting within my area (eg, to a pain management clinic), though that would still require seeking continuing education and multiple rounds of consultation. An employer who doesn't understand that a psychologist is not a "jack of all trades" needs to be educated, if not avoided entirely.