Psychology Professor Job Description

A Psychology Professor teaches the science of mind and behavior at a college or university and, depending on the campus, runs a research program alongside the teaching. O*NET's profile for Psychology Teachers, Postsecondary covers courses such as child, clinical and developmental psychology and psychological counseling, and it includes both faculty who mainly teach and those who combine teaching with research. That split defines the job. At a community college or a teaching-focused campus, the week is built around course sections, office hours and advising. At a research university, the classroom shares the calendar with a lab, a pipeline of manuscripts and the grant cycle that pays for both.

Teaching. Course loads run from the large introductory survey to upper-division seminars in cognitive, social, developmental, biological and clinical psychology, plus methods and statistics courses. The professor writes the syllabus, builds exams and lab assignments, chooses readings, grades, and decides how a course handles generative AI on papers and take-home work. In methods courses, students learn to design a study, run analyses in R, SPSS or JASP, and write a report in APA Style, and those skills follow them into graduate programs and jobs.

Research. Daily lab work looks different by subfield. A social psychologist may run online experiments through Qualtrics or Prolific; a cognitive neuroscientist books scanner or EEG time; a developmental researcher works with schools or families to build longitudinal samples. In each case the professor writes the protocol, gets institutional review board approval for work with human participants, recruits and trains student assistants, analyzes the data, and moves papers through peer review. Faculty with funded labs also write grant applications to agencies such as the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, then manage budgets, hiring and progress reports once an award arrives.

Mentoring. Faculty supervise honors theses and independent studies, sit on master's and dissertation committees, and write recommendation letters for students applying to graduate school or entering the workforce. Clinical and counseling faculty may also supervise trainees' practicum work, which ties part of the job to state licensing rules that sit outside the university.

Service. The rest of the calendar goes to department and campus committees: curriculum, faculty searches, program review and graduate admissions. Outside the campus, professors review manuscripts for journals, serve on editorial boards and grant panels, and take roles in professional societies.

Where the jobs are. In BLS's May 2025 industry data, colleges, universities and professional schools employed 34,380 psychology teachers and junior colleges employed 7,050. Those two settings ask for different mixes of work, so it pays to read each job posting for its teaching load, research expectations and how the department evaluates faculty for reappointment and promotion.

Degree. BLS says postsecondary teachers typically must have a Ph.D. or other doctoral degree in their field, and that a master's degree may be enough for some postsecondary teachers at community colleges. In psychology, that usually means a Ph.D. in a research area such as cognitive, social, developmental, biological, quantitative or industrial-organizational psychology. Faculty in clinical, counseling and school psychology programs typically hold a Ph.D. or Psy.D. that included supervised clinical training and an internship.

Research record. As a rough guide, candidates for research-track positions should be ready to show first-author or co-authored peer-reviewed papers, a clear research agenda for the coming years, and evidence that the agenda could attract outside funding, such as a fellowship, a small grant or a dissertation award. A postdoctoral appointment of one to three years is one route to building that record, and it gives time to learn new methods. Candidates for teaching-focused campuses should expect the research statement to matter less and the teaching evidence to matter more.

Teaching record. Serving as a teaching assistant is a start; teaching a course as instructor of record is stronger evidence. A teaching portfolio typically holds sample syllabi, student evaluations, a peer observation or two, and a short statement of teaching philosophy. A campus visit may include a teaching demonstration.

Licenses and certifications. As a rough guide, a clinical license matters for faculty who see clients or supervise trainees' clinical work. Those faculty generally hold:

• A license to practice psychology from the state psychology licensing board where they work
• A passing score on the Examination for Professional Practice in Psychology (EPPP), from the Association of State and Provincial Psychology Boards (ASPPB), which state boards use in licensing
• Board certification in a specialty from the American Board of Professional Psychology (ABPP), for those who pursue it

Methods and tools.

• Statistical programming in R or Python, plus SPSS, JASP, Mplus or Stata depending on the subfield
• Survey and experiment platforms such as Qualtrics, Prolific, PsychoPy or jsPsych
• Physiological and imaging methods (EEG, fMRI, eye tracking) for biological and cognitive work
• Open-science practice: preregistration and data sharing on the Open Science Framework
• Grant writing for federal agencies and foundations

The application packet. Expect to send a CV, a cover letter, research and teaching statements, sample publications and several letters of reference. Shortlisted candidates give a research talk and meet faculty, students and administrators, so the ability to explain a research program clearly to non-specialists matters.

O*NET, drawing on BLS projections, shows employment of psychology teachers at 52,300 in 2025 and rates projected growth from 2025 to 2035 as average, which it defines as 3% to 4%. It also projects about 3,700 openings a year on average over that decade. The figures cover the occupation as a whole, not tenure-track jobs alone.

The supply side. The supply of new psychology doctorates grew. In its report on 2024 doctorate recipients, the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics said psychology was one of the two science and engineering fields where the number of recipients grew the most between 2023 and 2024, by 200, or 5%. The same report found that the share of 2024 science and engineering doctorate recipients with definite commitments for employment or postdoc positions ranged from 63% in biological and biomedical sciences to 80% in psychology. A commitment can be a job in industry, government or health care as well as a faculty post, so the figure is not a measure of academic hiring.

The funding side. For research-track faculty, the federal grant environment matters too. On February 7, 2025, NIH issued guidance setting a 15% indirect cost rate for its grants; indirect costs are expenses not tied to one project that maintain the infrastructure and administrative support for federally funded research. The Congressional Research Service reported that a U.S. district court in Massachusetts permanently enjoined the policy on April 4, 2025, and that the First Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that decision on January 5, 2026. As of the CRS update dated April 17, 2026, the policy remained blocked. A department's grant portfolio, and how its university covers bridge funding when an award lapses, are fair questions to ask during a campus visit.

What helps candidates. The occupation spans research universities, regional public universities, liberal arts colleges and community colleges, and each weighs teaching, research and service differently. Candidates widen their options by preparing materials for more than one kind of campus: a research statement with a fundable agenda for research-intensive departments, and a teaching portfolio that shows course design and student mentoring for teaching-focused ones. Quantitative skill, comfort with open-science practices, and the ability to teach statistics and methods courses are worth showing in the packet.

Beyond the faculty track. Psychology doctorates can also work in applied research for government agencies, health systems, survey and policy organizations, and technology companies, in roles such as user experience research and people analytics. Faculty who keep ties to those sectors through consulting, collaborations or student placements can give their students more routes after graduation.

Pay over a career. BLS does not publish psychology faculty wages by rank, so the May 2025 band shown on this page covers instructors, lecturers and full professors together. Within one institution, the step from assistant to associate to full professor, plus summer salary from grants or summer teaching, can shape what a career pays.

Dear Members of the Search Committee,

I am writing to apply for the tenure-track Assistant Professor position in developmental psychology at Westbrook State University. I completed my Ph.D. in developmental psychology at Lakeview University and am now a postdoctoral researcher in the Child Language Lab at Harlan College, where I study how preschool children learn new words from conversations with peers and adults.

My research combines lab-based word-learning tasks with home recordings that capture everyday conversation. In my dissertation I showed that children in mixed-age classrooms picked up new words from older peers in ways that standard adult-child experiments miss. That work appears in two first-author articles, and a third paper on peer conversation in bilingual homes is under review. At Westbrook, I would build a lab that partners with local preschools and the campus child development center, giving undergraduates hands-on experience with recruitment, coding and analysis.

Teaching is the part of the job I look forward to most. As instructor of record at Lakeview, I taught Child Development twice and Research Methods once. In Research Methods, I replaced the final exam with a team project in which students preregistered a small study, collected data from classmates and wrote an APA Style report. Students told me it was the first time statistics made sense to them, and two later joined my lab. I would be glad to teach your lifespan development, methods and statistics courses, and to develop a seminar on language development.

I am also committed to mentoring students who are the first in their families to attend college, many of whom find research opportunities only when a faculty member invites them in. I have supervised eight undergraduate research assistants and two honors theses.

Thank you for considering my application. I would welcome the chance to discuss how my research and teaching could serve your department and students.

Sincerely, Jordan Ellis