It's worth keeping in mind that VA hiring processes are long, and even once you have an offer after the interview, that offer can be rescinded at any time until you have your official offer many months in. About a year and a half ago I accepted an offer for a staff psychologist position and was in a 10 month long hiring process before the offer was rescinded with no notice due to budget deficits. And things seem much more volatile now. Even if you see a VA job listing I wouldn't feel too confident that they will actually be able to hire someone to fill that position 6+ months from now.
And if the wait for HR to do their paperwork was 10 months before...
What's it going to be like now (and in the immediate future, say, the next 1-3 years) for the onboarding process?
I'd predict at least doubling or tripling those wait times to get hired (20 months? 30 months?) if the RIF--as it hits, if it does, many HR positions, as predicted--decimates the HR staff ranks.
If, on the other hand, the RIF's lead to 'greater efficiency and improved quality of services' (LOL), which is an administration talking point...
Expect those wait times for HR to process the onboarding paperwork (or an AI algorithm to do it) to be slashed in half or in quarter or more (like, maybe wait times of only 1-2 months for onboarding new providers).
These are testable predictions. It's an empirical question. I predict onboarding process delays of several times more than in the past but...we'll see.
Once you get 'on board' as a VA psychologist, however, it's an 'interesting' practice environment right now, to say the least. This is amply covered and discussed other threads because there's a huge need to address reality and the fact that the proverbial 'emperor' is stark naked in broad daylight every day. And there's no way to offer sound advice on whether one should start a career as a VA psychologist right now without mentioning the problematic practice environment. I predict the upcoming revision of the criteria for varying degrees of service connection for mental disorders (no telling when this will take effect, has been pushed back several times) will lead to a massive influx of veterans into mental health clinics to be 're-evaluated' by MH providers to ensure that their levels of 'functioning' across five domains (rated something like 0-4) is sufficient to support a claim of 100% disability according to the revised criteria. Also, many of these folks won't stop coming back...and back...and back...and back...and back...until they get the documentation they are demanding and are ultimately rated 100% disabled. Add in the reality that we're talking about 100% self-report on criteria that can be extremely difficult to 'pin down' with some sort of objective assessment/analysis (especially if it's not to the satisfaction of the self-reporter) and we're gonna see people losing it and going bonkers (and I'm talking about providers as well, here).
The administrators/supervisors in mental health (attempting to justify/save their own positions) are going to be passionately whipping the providers who see patients to 'increase their productivity' and 'success rate' at getting their veterans to report significant reductions in self-reported mental health symptoms as a result of treatment (PCL-5, GAD-7, and PHQ-9 scores)...meanwhile...
Many of the veterans themselves are going to be trying to convince their providers that they are 'untreatable' and their symptoms 'aren't responding' to treatment efforts and that they need to be rated higher in terms of the provider's opinions about how disabled they are due to their mental health conditions and that they better damn well document in the veteran's chart just how gosh darn untreatable their PTSD is as well as every single symptom that the veteran reports as having had since the last appointment in order to support their rating increase.
I'm actually interested to see how individual psychologists handle this 'Kobayashi Maru' (Star Trek: Wrath of Khan reference) no-win scenario. It has played out in minor form for years but we are about to enter the 'forcing of hands' stage real soon.
