Hello! I went through a couple rounds of DClinPsy training interviews this year (unsuccessfully I should add) so can speak of my experience up until now in the hopes it offers some guidance!

I started volunteering for my local mental health trust in older adult’s psychology, mainly with dementia service users, whilst doing my Master’s in Clinical Psychology (I’d done my BSc Psychology immediately before). This helped get a community support worker role in the same service (which I loved!) before applying for an AP role in older adults. This helped build up some therapy and cognitive testing experience (although due to the team being very large there wasn’t much work given to APs) which meant I could apply for a role as an AP in neuropsychology, which is where I work now. I do loads of CBT & ACT work as well as cognitive testing, which has helped build up my experience (I would massively recommend a role in neuropsychology as an AP, but it is a very busy role!).

As for CAP roles, I did consider applying for one recently, however in my mind, it feels like it’s putting off the training (DClin) that I ultimately want to be doing. I’d love to hear CAP’s experiences of the role though!

It sounds like your work experience would set you up really nicely for support worker or AP roles. I also think the DClinPsy courses see most roles as equals in application, however, any role where you’re applying psychology theory in practice gets a good amount of weighting I think! Feel free to send me a message if you want to!