Professional skills assessment and the training of psychologists

This research aimed to evaluate professional skills related to the education process in Psychology and the psychologist's work field. An inventory of the psychologists' professional qualifications and their levels of importance were constructed, involving 16 categories, 132 items and an ordinal scale of five points. This inventory was submitted to a process of semantic and content validation. The sample consisted of 102 individuals (21 to 64 years old), 71.6% of which were females, and was made up of professors, interns and psychologists that attended an undergraduate Psychology course in a Brazilian Southern institution. The qualifications that stood out among the ones that were considered essential for the psychologists' work are: to maintain secrecy about the information given by the clients, to be part of multiprofessional staffs, and to take responsibility for their work results. In general, the qualifications that are indispensable for the psychologist's work proved to be related to the professional ethics dimension, to the communication contexts and to the social and professional relations.