Consultation
Not long ago the vast majority of clinical psychologists practiced in relatively restricted roles providing assessment and therapy services. There has been a pronounced shift in the field and today most psychologists are moving into expanded roles and act
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Jon Frew
Abstract: Not long ago the vast majority of clinical psychologists practiced in relatively restricted roles providing assessment and therapy services. There has been a pronounced shift in the field and today most psychologists are moving into expanded roles and activities. One of these roles is organizational consultation. In this chapter some of the requisite competencies to provide consultation services to organizations are outlined at both the basic and expert levels. As there is no uniformity or agreement about the number or definition of consultation competencies, a case study approach was employed to identify the range of competencies that were employed by the author in two organizational consulting projects.
20.1 Overview In 1990, I designed and taught a course entitled “Organizational Consultation” in a PsyD program at a university in the Pacific Northwest. The class was a popular elective in a doctoral program curriculum replete with required courses which prepared students to assume the traditional roles of a clinical psychologist. In that era, the vast majority of students in that program aspired to a career trajectory that would ultimately land them in private practice, in which they would provide assessment and psychotherapy services. Despite the popularity of the organizational consultation class, which was offered once a year until 1998, it was viewed by most students as a “boutique” course, a curious diversion from the program’s rigorous clinical training and as a class that provided a skill set that would probably never be utilized. In 1999, I launched a new course in that PsyD program entitled “Professional Roles.” This course was designed to reflect the educational model of the National Council of Schools and Programs of Professional Psychology (NCSPP) first outlined in the landmark article written by Peterson, Peterson, Abrams, and Stricker (1997). Organizational consulting as a role and a set of competencies was transplanted into the Professional Roles course, joining others including supervision, teaching, management, and administration. Over the course of the past 10 years, as I have continued to modify and teach the Professional Roles class, I have noted a dramatic shift in the attitudes and perspectives of current clinical psychology students, concerning the place of organizational consulting (and other nonclinical roles) in their career aspiration portfolio. The vast majority of students now understand that their future as a professional psychologist will be more financially rewarding and personally satisfying, if they are trained to carry out both clinical and nonclinical activities in a variety of roles. This shift in the recent and current students’ career visions is evident as well in the broader field of psychology. Levant et al. (2001, p. 80) encourage psychologists to envision and access new roles. F or professional psychology to continue to grow and flourish, psychologists must identify and conceptualize roles that they are well suited to take up in the near and mor
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