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This final assignment provides you an opportunity to transform your vision into reality by translating your exploration and brainstorming activities into a plan to actualize your vision and achieve your goals. By now, you are a practitioner-scholar with a lot of knowledge and insight about your interests in psychology and your career trajectory.

Preparation

Throughout this course, you had opportunities to clarify your passions and interests in psychology practice and scholarship, to create goals to help you achieve your vision, and to explore the competencies and requirements for pursuing a career in your specialized field of psychology. To begin this assignment:

• Take some time to reflect on all you have learned about the field and ways you can contribute to psychology, especially within your specialization.
• Review work you have done in previous weeks that you could revise and incorporate into this final assignment.
• Review the Your Career in Psychology Template [DOC]. You will need to use this template when writing your paper.
• Use the Your Career in Psychology Worksheet [DOC] to organize your ideas.
• Read the Your Career in Psychology Assignment Exemplar [PDF] for an example of a completed assignment.

Instructions

Complete the following in the Your Career in Psychology Template:

1. APPLICATION AND RESEARCH VISION

• Describe your vision for your career as a practitioner-scholar.
• Discuss how you would apply the findings from your literature review to your future professional practice in psychology.
  • What aspects of your research affected your vision or goals?
  • Given this, what topics do you think you would be interested in researching in the future?
• Analyze how your work this quarter will help you accomplish the functions, responsibilities, and ethics required of a professional in your specialization. Remember to critically evaluate all information you use.
• Describe how your vision was affected by the information in your readings from your Career Paths in Psychology text and in your exploration of the Career Center and other resources.

2. PROFESSIONAL COMPETENCIES AND REQUIREMENTS

Understanding the competencies and responsibilities involved in your future career in psychology is essential for growing as a practitioner-scholar in your field. It is also necessary to understand any requirements needed for your specialized practice and scholarship.

For this step in the assignment, describe the competencies, responsibilities, ethical considerations, and other requirements needed for achieving your vision and goals as a professional in psychology. These include:

• Capella program and specialization requirements.
• Credentialing, certification, licensure, and accreditation practices and standards.
• Analyze the role of the practitioner-scholar model in guiding professional development.
  • Skills, abilities, and attitudes critical to success in the field of psychology, such as those related to critical thinking, decision making, problem solving, evidence-based practices, ethical integrity, cultural competence, and conflict resolution.
    • Make note of skills, abilities, and attitudes related to the practitioner-scholar model and the experience you had in researching scholarly sources in your literature review.
  • Ethical codes, principles, laws, and policies applicable to your chosen career path.

3. ACTION PLAN

With all this knowledge of your vision and goals, and the competencies and requirements for the field in hand, you are ready to plot your course to making these aspirations a reality. The final step in this assignment is to create an action plan to achieve your goals. This means translating the requirements for your profession and the development areas you identified into specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timed (SMART) steps to achieve your vision.

Include these elements in your action plan:

• Plan for completing your Capella program.
• Possible opportunities for additional training or volunteer work to address gaps in your knowledge or skills.
• Possible opportunities in your current position to develop additional skills.
• Capella community groups and professional organizations that you could join for networking with others and completing additional informational interviews.
• How you will stay current with the research, literature, and ethics in the field.
• Steps you can take to become more inclusive in your professional life.
• How you can apply what you have learned in this course about researching psychological literature and evaluating it in terms of reliability, credibility, ethics, and value.
• How you will apply critical thinking and effective decision making in your specialization.
• How you will use Capella’s support resources to develop the skills required to improve your writing and other competencies essential to the profession and to your role as a graduate learner.

Review the SMART Goals presentation, Career Center resources, and search the Capella University Library for additional reflective exercises and inspiring ideas about transforming your vision into an action plan.

Before You Submit

To maximize your scoring potential, be sure that you fully address all assignment requirements and meet the criteria in the scoring guide that will be used to assess your assignment. It is helpful to self-score your paper using the scoring guide before submitting, to be sure that you are meeting criteria for the grade you want to earn.

SMARTHINKING

It is recommended that you have your assignment reviewed by Smarthinking. Plan 24–48 hours to get results from this service, and additional time to make revisions before you submit the assignment to your instructor for a grade.

SAFEASSIGN

Submit a draft of your assignment to SafeAssign for review of proper citations and references. It is very important that you always submit your work as a draft so you can make revisions before submitting your assignment for grading. Refer to the courseroom SafeAssign resources for guidance in accessing your feedback from SafeAssign, interpreting your report, and improving your writing and citations for your assignment.

Additional Requirements

• Written communication: Should be free of errors that detract from the overall message.
• Writing style: APA expectations for scholarly writing include the use of third-person narrative, unless it is awkward to do so. However, because you are talking about yourself in this paper, you may write in the first person.
• APA formatting: References and citations should be formatted according to current APA style and format. Include a title page, abstract, and references list.
• Resources: Minimum of five resources with at least three of them from course readings. Your references may include both scholarly literature and practitioner sources. All references need to be cited in-text, according to current APA standards. Remember that citations are to support your thoughts, not take the place of them!
• Length: 5–7 double-spaced pages, not including the title page or references page.
• Font and font size: Times New Roman, 12-point.
• Template: Use the Your Career in Psychology Template [DOC] to format your assignment. Also see the Week 9 Assignment Exemplar for an example of a completed assignment.
• Submission: Once you are satisfied with your paper and have made all necessary revisions, submit your assignment no later than Sunday at 11:59 p.m. Central time.

SCORING GUIDE

Your work will be evaluated using this criteria.

VIEW SCORING GUIDE

Competencies Measured

By successfully completing this assignment, you will demonstrate your proficiency in the following course competencies and scoring guide criteria:

• Competency 1: Analyze the role of the practitioner-scholar model in guiding professional development.
  • Describe a vision for your career, including three specific goals.
  • Explain how your literature review and research on career information affected your vision.
• Competency 2: Evaluate psychological literature in terms of reliability, credibility, ethics, and value.
  • Discuss how to evaluate psychological literature in terms of reliability, credibility, ethics, and value.
• Competency 3: Analyze the functions, responsibilities, and ethics required of a psychology professional.
  • Analyze the functions, responsibilities, and ethics required of a psychology professional.
  • Create an action plan to achieve your goals that includes most of the required elements.
• Competency 4: Apply critical thinking and effective decision making.
  • Discuss how to apply critical thinking and effective decision making as a psychologist.
• Competency 5: Communicate in a manner that is scholarly, professional, and consistent with expectations for professionals in the field of psychology.
  • Convey purpose, in an appropriate tone and style, incorporating supporting evidence and adhering to organizational, professional, and scholarly writing standards.
  • Apply APA style and formatting to scholarly writing.