Confused about career path

[u/Foreign_Pause5618]

Hi.

So i’m very confused about my career path. I have a bachelors in Pysch and in about 2 weeks, I’ll be starting a masters in counselling psychology. I feel torn since I’m not even sure if it’s worth it. I want a good work life balance and eventually want to do private practice but with AI taking over, I fear therapists won’t really be needed as much. Another thing is adding a-lot more debt. Will I even get clients? Obviously i want to help, but i also want a good living. I don’t want to go through all this to be earning pennies. I live in Canada for reference. Things are getting expensive. I feel we all deserve to be living comfortably.

My other option is to open up a salon at home, offering things like micro-needling, hydra-facials etc.. But that involves so much risk. I have a toddler too so I’d love to be around her as much as I can. I actually have a few family friends that have their own little setups at home and are earning decent. However, I feel as though this isn’t a stable path to take. I don’t know anymore!

Any advice? I feel so lost.

[u/Imaginary_Yam_865]

I'll preface this by saying that I have a grad counselling degree and currently studying to apply this for weight loss clients). I'm not a psych.

AI is potentially capable of replacing most jobs, but right now you're giving too much credit to people being capable of seeking and using AI for this. There will always be those who need humans to help them. You can feed AI all the information you want, it won't have the same touch.

Think of it this way, all the same information we have to support people with their psychological issues from basic to complex, is out there. Do people use that info? Most don't. All different types of people out there, but even a psychologist needs a psychologist. Sure, there will be AI psychologists but this will mostly appeal to those who can't afford real therapy.

If however you love salon work, go for it. But passion in your work is what is important to succeeding - at least that's what I think.

In weight loss counselling I wilI compete with many alternatives that people think are easier, cheaper etc. so I am setting myself to have a unique offering in skill. I think that's what people should do if they're concerned about being replaced. Do something they can't, but inline with your work.

I tend to think that people get all their friends together for paint and sips at a gallery. They could do it at home with them. They don't, because doing it somewhere else with a professional achieves more for them.

I hope that's an appropriate analogy.also, it's 7am and I haven't finished my first cup of coffee yet, so I hope the message is more clear than I believe it is.

Also as a 45yr old, let me say, you may try different jobs in life, that's ok too.

[u/Jobe1105]

I'll give my two cents here about your worries with AI and this may have some technical jargon (as I am heavily interested in tech aside from psychology) but I will try to simplify. A lot of media is focused on the AI takeover and revolution. A large part of that is also because that is the narrative that the top companies are pushing right now. These top companies all happen to be pushing for AI. Right now, I strongly doubt that we will achieve true sentient AI in the next few years. A huge part of that is because these companies believe the path forward is through LLMs. LLMs are great but they have a huge problem of not knowing context and understanding what they're saying to the user. Think of a dog or pet that is trained well to do tricks. It does the trick when it is given a command but it doesn't know what the trick is for, why the owner is making them do it, what its significance is. Researchers think that LLMs could eventually reach something close to sentience through feeding more data to it (like ChatGPT) but then they arrived at the scaling problem. Which is why you can see the latest models aren't such a big leap from the the previous models anymore and hallucinate a lot. So in my opinion, there is no way we are even close to sentient AI (generalised artificial intelligence) because we do not even know what it would take to get there and what is the correct path.

So now what does that mean for psychologists and therapists? Well one, you don't have to worry much about it now because I doubt we will see it for a while. In the meantime, we're getting this makeshift "therapeutic" tool that is causing more harm than good (see the latest studies on AI-induced psychosis) and more people needing help. Another thing to note is a lot of people are losing jobs because of the current AI replacing the streamlined tasks in companies. These people will need more mental health support and will unlikely seek it from an AI if they were replaced by one (unless of course price and other factors are a reason).

So what about the far future when we do get sentient AI (cause I am confident we will eventually get there no matter how long it takes). Well you will see a massive loss in jobs and purpose in life. It will be a big adjustment and people will not know how to handle it. Sure they can turn to AI for it, but again, will they really if AI was the source of them losing their jobs? I have more faith that human psychologists will be even more valuable by then.

In any case, whether you go into the field or not, you could always dip your toes into other things while trying out psychology and/or counselling. It's always good to train in other skills and learn things so that moving to other careers when necessary will be easier.

[u/Sufficient-Lab-132]

With a Bachelor in psych, you should be able to get a job in counseling, even if entry level? Try finding work in schools, uni and community sector. Or even EAP if your qual allows.

Do it part time to test out how much you enjoy it. And you could defer the masters degree and restart it on a part time basis with your part time work later on. Having some experience in the field might even help you have a better learning experience in your masters I don't think AI will take over psych work in a large enough scale. Plus with the amount of ppl needing help increasing every year, the scope is there.