Building a Career in Cyberpsychology

This chapter will provide the context of psychology as a discipline and its evolution over time as a curriculum subject. This will also note the higher education context as a key sector in which it has flourished as a subject area, and how, it has diverged into specialised pathways and career routes. This chapter will set out how the context of higher education (HE) fee increases, HE’s position under consumer law and its regulation in respect of the TEF and B3, has increased the focus/pressure on graduate outcomes. The chapter will set this as a context from which to discuss how the study of psychology has, over time, perhaps shifted the mindset of students and graduates towards the tangible outcomes of their psychology degree rather than studying it solely for satisfying their curiosities for the subject itself. This can present a suitable context to illustrate how career outcomes are pertinent and how the book is situated to respond to this.

This chapter will outline more specifically the realities of being psychology graduate. This will be framed in relation to issues such as the popularity of psychology as a subject at FE/HE and estimated number of psychology graduates per year. From this, the chapter will outline the value of a psychology degree from the perspective of subject knowledge of core domains, and extensive transferable skills (including a synergy between the “hard” scientific enquiry skills and the “soft” interpersonal ones). Following this, some attention is paid to the fact that although there are a significant number of professional training routes in Psychology, the only a small percentage of graduates actually pursue these. This highlights the value of focusing on the more “Psychologically-informed professions”, which helps situate the purpose of this book. Finally, more specifically to cyberpsychology, this chapter will conclude with some observations about how this specific field of psychology is well situated to tackle 21st century global issues (e.g., digital adoption, tech poverty, AI, automation etc), which might present a competitive edge for any graduates looking to set themselves up competitively within the job market.

This chapter will start by defining what cyberpsychology is, and how it is positioned to understand the digitally-connected human experience. This present a highly marketable perspective which can be applied to many 21st century societal challenges and opportunities. The chapter will move onto the consider the various ways we intersect with the digital in relation to our behaviours, to help reader navigate the various nuances which cyberpsychology might offer in terms of understanding digital and online behaviours. Two key principles will be introduced in this chapter which underpin the value of cyberpsychology as it is presented in the subsequent chapters. 1) how human factors are central to all applications of cyberpsychology, whereby this offers the “human” insight perspective into digital systems, processes and strategies which might otherwise be absent 2) how cyberpsychology is well suited to understand how our intersection with algorithms and AI can forge more personalised experiences and this in turn, might harness more effective or satisfying human experiences in leisure, business, recreation, and service use. These are key considerations for the forthcoming chapters about how cyberpsychology subject knowledge of these things, might offer specific advantages to certain sectors and careers above and beyond what a more traditional psychology insight might do.

This chapter introduces the first specified career domain which is consumer cyberpsychology. This is an intersection between cyberpsychology, communication and (digital) marketing. This will be defined with some examples of the types of focus this might include and the value of cyberpsychology in this domain. Among the range of issues discussed, some include: online consumer insights and behaviour, user-centred design/user experience insights, psychographic profiling based on online behaviour, decision making in online sales, how online behaviour help communicate brand identity/visual corporate identity.