Licensing Organizational Psychologists: The Australian Experience

We comment on the focal article (LCIOP Joint Task Force, 2017) from the perspective of practitioners and academics in industrial and organizational (I-O) psychology, who have been involved for some years in debates about the regulation of psychology in Australia. Our perception is that the regulation of psychology in Australia has had an adverse impact on industrial and organizational psychology (organizational psychology is the common term in Australia) by constricting curriculum requirements to emphasize health professional training. There are problems with supervision and requirements for continuing professional development (CPD) that affect organizational psychologists and further constrain their supply. There is a basic failure to appreciate that not all branches of psychology are based on a model of one-on-one work with individuals, as the authors of the focal article note in citing Sackett (1986). Some areas of practice, such as individual assessment and coaching, for example, may engage one-on-one with individuals, but the practice of psychology is more diverse than this. Central to the poor outcome for Australian organizational psychologists is that registration in Australia is conducted by what the authors of the focal article describe as "statutory certification" or a "title act." It is the title "psychologist" that is protected and not any psychological practice, which means that a practitioner may do whatever a psychologist does but cannot call themselves such. This has been the case in Australia since the first psychologists registration act was legislated in 1965 and is unlikely to change, given the difficulties in describing psychological practice sufficiently for the purposes of legislative drafting. Unfortunately Australia did not have the benefit of the work of the American Psychological Association (APA, 2011) on titles, because the distinction between health service provider (HSP) and general applied psychologist (GAP) would have been helpful. It is probably too late in the day for Australia to benefit from this distinction, and it may not solve all the problems in seeking to regulate a profession as diverse as psychology, but it is likely to provide a better outcome than regulation by the single title "psychologist" has in Australia. In what follows, we first present the legislative and administrative framework that regulates the psychology profession in the Australian context. Then we outline the effects as we see them that this regulation has had on the practice of I-O psychology in the country, before offering some conclusions.