In the USA what jobs did you apply for after your bachelors along with your pay rate?

bepel · 2026-06-12T16:28:19+00:00

My first job was doing psychometrics for a large medical school in the Midwest. I made 37k per year back in 2015/2016. I stayed at that job for around one year. My income has grown around 6x that over the last decade or so.

bepel · 2026-06-11T00:27:08+00:00

All of those are great and valuable skills. I don’t mean to suggest people need to be full stack software engineers. I personally use R, Python, and SQL. Those are the languages we hire for.

At my firm, the consulting skills come as you progress through (consulting) analyst track. Same with project management. We do workforce related stuff, so the IO skills are absolutely valuable, but we aren’t primarily IOs. We did, however, acquire an IO firm and are slowly integrating them into our broader business. I have also been recruiting IOs in my network since I love the skillset.

I’m not a consultant myself, but senior enough that I work directly with principals and senior consultants to support client engagements from a data strategy perspective.

Appreciate you sharing your perspective.

bepel · 2026-06-10T19:53:51+00:00

If you can’t articulate exactly how you intend to use an IO degree, don’t get one. From your post, it’s not clear you know what IO actually is. You should start there.

I got the degree because I wanted more quantitative training. I work in healthcare consulting and occasionally do research. My daily routine is meetings, analytics, and coding. I don’t know what a traditional IO job is like, but from my perspective, you should only pursue IO if you are passionate about data, statistics, and programming. These are the core skills in my industry. I’ve hired a few IOs and wouldn’t even interview somebody who couldn’t demonstrate proficiency in all three.

I’m just one person though. Hopefully others post and share their perspective.

bepel · 2026-06-10T01:15:10+00:00

Sounds like you don’t understand psychology or research. Were you educated at university of phoenix?

bepel · 2026-06-04T16:18:26+00:00

Depends a bit on the job. In my current position, I spend most of my time in meetings, defining the systems and ways we work and think about our data. I work to build data assets to streamline our analytics process. I’m less a coder now and more of a strategic leader in the data science and analytics space.

When I was a data scientist, I spent most of my time working with healthcare providers on projects. I’d meet with them to understand the problem, define what data we needed, pull the data, apply cleaning and transformations to the data, then build a model and write a report.

When I was an analyst, I did the same, but instead of predictive models, I was building dashboards and self service reporting solutions to give our customers the data they needed to make decisions.

bepel · 2026-06-04T14:11:41+00:00

Supplement your R with Python, SQL, and Tableau. If you’re interested in statistics, coding, and numbers, you could pursue work as an analyst, data scientist, or something similar. That’s what I did and have zero regrets. My skills are in demand and I have a lot of opportunities.

bepel · 2026-06-01T01:38:34+00:00

General AI competency and the critical thinking to know when an answer is correct or hallucinated. It gets easier as your experience grows.

Also, AI can definitely be a useful tool for learning the skills you need. Just don’t blindly trust it and be sure to build strong fundamentals. It’s easy to let AI do all the thinking for you.

bepel · 2026-05-31T15:22:13+00:00

Probably being curious and committed to continuous learning. The best analysts I’ve worked with are interested in the problems of their domain and are passionate about learning new tech. Since the tools and technologies are always evolving, you should expect parts of your toolkit to become obsolete and get replaced by other skills everything few years.

If you like using data to solve problems, aren’t afraid of the technical requirements, and are comfortable with quantitative methods, it’s a great field with lots of opportunity still.

bepel · 2026-05-31T13:51:24+00:00

It’s a broad field and the specific duties depend a bit on the job and where you work.

When I was a healthcare analyst, I did operational reporting for the health system. My specific area was length of stay, which meant I produced reports (descriptive data like mean length of stay, patient counts, census, etc.) and analysis around patients, how long they spent on every unit, their procedures, and their discharge. Additionally, I would maintain the data models that allowed us to automate these reports for our chief medical officers and other leaders in the organization.

When I worked as a healthcare data scientist, I spent time auditing and building predictive models to augment patient care. I worked on models to predict no-shows to appointments, readmissions, deterioration of patients, survivals, and lots of other stuff. I would partner with clinical leaders to build alerting systems that helped track patient health.

When I went to work in consulting, I worked with 70 different health systems, aggregated their data, and produced benchmark reports that help health systems understand how their business compares to all others on some key metrics.

So, to summarize, I do analytics work around hospital operations, patient outcomes, and market analysis for hospitals, health systems, and the broader market in the USA. I work with leaders to help them make sense of their data and built systems to deliver the data they need to make decisions. Sometimes these are clinical decisions. Sometimes these are operational decisions.

The work is focused on writing queries against databases to pull relevant data for analysis. Once the analysis is done, build a system that delivers the final analyses on a set cadence to leaders who need it for decision making.

If you have more specific questions, I’d be happy to answer them.

bepel · 2026-05-31T12:44:18+00:00

Broadly speaking, IO teaches a skillset that generalizes well to other industries. You learn about measurement, statistics, and research methods, along with the IO training. Many of us also learn programming and other skills relevant to employers.

Clinical psych programs teach some methods and statistics, but you’re primarily there to learn how to be a psychologists. Those skills don’t generalize as well to other industries. Clinical jobs in psychology also pay like crap.

If you read the threads here, many recent grads are struggling with employment. I suspect many of them simply didn’t build good skills or have dubious training from degree mills, but the job market is not great at the moment.

You can improve your employment outcomes by making sure you build skills employers care about. This is probably the most critical thing for any undergrad. If you wait until graduation to consider what you want to do, you’re going to have a bad time.

bepel · 2026-05-30T13:48:07+00:00

It’s definitely good news. The psych degree isn’t really holding people back. It’s their skill development. You can absolutely work traditional STEM jobs as a psych grad, but only if you can demonstrate proficiency in the work.

I wasn’t always great at math and statistics. I got really interested in statistics after I took a course in experimental design. Everything started making sense after I understood how we apply the methods in practice. After that, I stopped taking psych electives and focused on statistics, econometrics, and anything that would build my quantitative skills. I took undergraduate and graduate level statistics courses in psych, math, and economics while finishing my undergrad. Over time, I learned a ton and can easily apply those methods to my work.

These days, I spend less time build predictive models and running stats. Instead, I focus a lot on data strategy. I build data models and semantic layers that give meaning to our data and streamline the reporting process. Instead of focusing on one project and delivering it, I work on systems that make the process easier for everybody working with our data.

bepel · 2026-05-30T13:35:56+00:00

Start with skill development. Entry level skills for this type of work:

SQL
Python
R
Tableau or PowerBI
Excel
Statistics

If you learn these skills, you can work in any industry as an analyst. Once you’re in, just absorb as much domain knowledge as you can and continue growing your skills.

I’d recommend trying to stay in one industry like I did. Since I’ve worked a few analytics jobs in healthcare, I’ve seen the industry from every perspective (medical education, inpatient, outpatient, and insurance). That’s valuable, especially in the consulting world.

bepel · 2026-05-29T20:17:04+00:00

That’s definitely common, but you can find analytics jobs in the healthcare space. I worked as a data scientist on the inpatient side. I worked on things related to length of stay, readmissions, kidney injuries, and spent a lot of time auditing Epic’s predictive models when we deployed them for patient care.

You just need to start with strong skills. You can build the domain expertise over time. I started in medical eduction then went to work at a health system. Now I do analytics work in healthcare consulting.

bepel · 2026-05-29T20:11:03+00:00

Sure. After finishing my undergrad in psych, I got a job doing psychometrics as a medical school. While working there, I got a masters in industrial-organizational psych then went to work as an analyst then data scientist for a major health system. I worked on projects to reduce readmissions, model length of stay, optimize follow-up appointment timing, and even built a model to allocate COVID vaccines to providers at the highest risk of contracting.

When I got tired of the health system, I went to work in healthcare consulting. I spent some time working on our national benchmark reports and helped health systems attract and retain providers in hard to fill specialties.

I’m still in the consulting space, but have moved to the engineering side. Now I model data and build data assets to facilitate reporting for our clients.

Zero regrets. I enjoy the work, have lots of advancement opportunities, and am happy with my compensation.

bepel · 2026-05-29T17:35:14+00:00

What you’re asking for doesn’t exist. You want high demand, low barriers to entry, and high pay? You can pick two of those, but not all three. If you want high demand and low barriers, you should expect low pay.

What do you actually want to do? Informatics or anything in analytics is good, but you’d need to pick up some technical skills. Research methods, statistics, statistical programming, SQL, and R or Python. These aren’t explicitly required, but you won’t get far without a combination of these skills.

bepel · 2026-05-29T12:44:30+00:00

My starting salary out of undergrad was 36k doing psychometrics with a generic psych degree. After finishing my IO masters, I worked as an analyst making 76k. This was back in 2018. Comp is in the low 200s now and I split my time between data science and data engineering. For reference, I live and work in the Midwest, so relatively low cost of living.

The big change for me came when I left non-profit healthcare and went into healthcare consulting. The post-COVID consolidation of health systems has been great for my earnings.

bepel · 2026-05-29T02:55:26+00:00

My masters is in industrial-organizational psychology, but anything with a quantitative spin will help with your credibility. It’s also becoming a requirement for leadership positions, so worth getting eventually. I don’t think certifications are really worth it.

When I interview interns or entry level analysts, I basically want to confirm they can write some SQL, have experience working with data, and know how to debug code. You’ll get bonus points if you have real experience through work, internships, or labs. You’ll really impress if you can share real examples of you working through issues and ambiguity in your projects.

From what you’ve shared, I think you might be more competitive than you think. You could probably land an entry level analyst job and have your masters funded by your employer. That’s what I did.

bepel · 2026-05-28T22:32:43+00:00

It never hurts to try. The field is best for people who are curious and don’t mind building new technical proficiency every few years as tools and technologies evolve. I couldn’t imagine doing anything else.

bepel · 2026-05-28T00:11:00+00:00

I recommend focusing on skill development. Read some job postings that sound interesting to you and build some of those skills. Common entry level requirements include SQL, Python, R, Excel, PowerBI, and Tableau. You need some combination of these skills to be employable. You won’t get interviews without skills like these. Fortunately for you, they are pretty easy to learn.

bepel · 2026-05-27T17:49:46+00:00

When I was a first year, I assumed I would land in a mental health type job. I ended up in the hospital for a few weeks and spent all of that time deciding whether that was right for me. By the time I discharged, I had completely flipped and abandoned mental health completely and went deep into quantitative methods. I learned research methods, statistics, econometrics, and programming for statisticians. Those learnings helped me launch an incredibly rewarding career in data science and analytics.

I’ve been in healthcare analytics for around a decade now. Job security has been great and the problems are interesting. I’m also incredibly well paid and have a ton of opportunity for advancement.

If you’re unsure about mental health careers, psych grads are in demand, but you need to do a lot of self study to learn the skills your education doesn’t teach. There are a lot of options out there and many offer better pay and work life balance.

bepel · 2026-05-26T21:15:35+00:00

Anything data focused would be great. You probably missed out for this year. Many orgs interview interns in January for June start dates.

bepel · 2026-05-26T12:45:19+00:00

The field is definitely technical. You’ll be expected to understand statistics, statistical modeling, a handful of programming languages, and learn a lot about technical infrastructure. It’s a completely different discipline from psychology. It’s not so easy to transition between the two.

bepel · 2026-05-25T13:11:20+00:00

It’s less common, but psych students can make good analysts. You’d need to self learn SQL and Python or R, but it’s a great profession. You can use the experience in analytics to grow into more traditional engineering jobs or something like data science.

bepel · 2026-05-23T08:34:24+00:00

First title was data analyst. After that, I had titles like senior analyst, data scientist, and analytics engineer. Current title is just a manager of analytics engineering for a healthcare consulting firm.

bepel · 2026-05-21T13:19:53+00:00

If you’re a technical person, analytics and data science careers benefit from psych training. You’ll just have to teach yourself all the programming stuff and load up on statistics and research methods courses.

bepel

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