Psychologist job description
55 verified openings in Psychologist
A first session is an evaluation before it is anything else. Clinical and counseling psychologists diagnose mental and emotional disorders through observation, interviews, and psychological testing, then treat what they find with individual or group psychotherapy, behavior modification programs, and counseling aimed at personal, social, educational, and vocational adjustment. The pay reflects the preparation: BLS reported a May 2025 median of $100,580 across the occupation's 75,990 jobs, with the lowest-earning tenth under $55,170 a year and the highest tenth above $180,960.
Core Duties and Responsibilities
No duty carries more weight than assessing whether a patient may harm themselves or someone else. Documentation follows close behind: session and progress notes, recommendations, treatment plans, and formal client reports. Between those poles is the clinical work itself: identifying psychological, emotional, or behavioral issues from interviews, tests, and records, counseling individuals, families, and groups through crisis toward realistic plans, specifying how often therapy happens, how intense it is, and how long it runs, and checking whether diagnosis and treatment still fit, revising either when they do not. Psychologists also choose, score, and interpret the standardized tests behind their findings, and they keep up with current research.
Common Skills and Technologies
Close reading tops the skill list, which is less strange than it sounds for a helping profession: records, research, and test manuals fill the hours between sessions. Social perceptiveness, writing, active listening, and critical thinking rate just behind it. Employers name eClinicalWorks for the electronic health record, and all three technologies O*NET marks as in demand for this occupation are meeting software: Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams. Google Docs, Google Sheets, Excel, and Outlook handle the paperwork.
Education, Training, and Career Path
This is O*NET's Job Zone 5, its extensive-preparation tier, where graduate school is assumed and some paths run through a Ph.D. Asked what the position requires of a candidate, 92 percent of survey answers came back at the doctorate level or above: 48 percent said post-doctoral training, 44 percent named a doctorate, and 8 percent a master's degree. Two of the titles the field reports carry the license in the name: Licensed Clinical Psychologist and Licensed Professional Counselor.
Sources: O*NET 30.0, 19-3033.00 Clinical and Counseling Psychologists, https://www.onetonline.org/link/summary/19-3033.00. BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025, 19-3033, https://www.bls.gov/oes/tables.htm.