Why Psychology Needs a Different Model of Professional Development

Many experienced psychologists reach a point where they have plenty of expertise, several possible directions they could take, and no obvious route telling them what comes next. What does it mean when the old professional map stops being quite so useful?

One of my favourite ways of describing private practice is that it is a little bit like being in The Lord of the Rings. One minute you are a hobbit happily gambolling through the Shire, and the next you are in the Forest of Fangorn fighting the orcs.

We have a good laugh about this in our programme The Psychology Practice Accelerator (TPPA), but there is something quite serious underneath the joke. Perhaps you know the feeling. You have several possible directions you could take, plenty of ideas that you'd love to grow, but only so much time and energy to give them. The work already in front of you keeps getting done because it works, even if it is labour-intensive, while the question of how to get out of an increasingly competitive space with squeezed rates and more uncertainty niggles at the back of your mind.

I think many of us imagine that the goal of developing a practice is to climb to the top of Mount Clarity. Once we get to the top, we will finally be able to see the whole landscape: who we are, what we are here to do, what our practice should look like and where we are going next. If we can just stay up there, perhaps everything will remain clear.

Except that is not really how practice, or life, works.

The world keeps moving. We change as people, and as practitioners, as our lives change. The people and communities we serve change. New technologies emerge, institutions and markets shift, and political, economic and environmental conditions change around us. Sooner or later, the map that used to make sense stops making quite so much sense.

That can feel deeply uncomfortable… but I think feeling stuck often gets a bad rap. We assume it means that something has gone wrong, that we have lost our way, become unclear, failed to make a decision, or fumbled the strategy.

But I have been wondering whether sometimes the experience of feeling stuck is telling us something different. Perhaps we are not failing to follow the old map. Maybe the old map is beginning to break down.

When the old paradigm stops explaining what you can see

Thomas Kuhn famously wrote about scientific revolutions as periods in which a dominant paradigm works reasonably well until anomalies begin to accumulate. Questions appear that it cannot quite answer, new evidence does not fit neatly inside it, and gradually another way of understanding what is happening begins to emerge.

I had seen something similar in organisations through my own Masters research for Cranfield School of Management, where I was modelling strategic drift in executive teams. What interested me was that the leaders who managed to pull their organisations out of drift stopped incorporating each new anomaly into the existing way of seeing the world. They noticed the red flags and used them to reformulate their perspective. They changed the frame through which they were making sense of what was happening, and that allowed different strategic possibilities to become visible.

That idea has stayed with me. Sometimes the problem is not solved by making the existing model work. Sometimes the accumulation of things that no longer quite fit is telling us that the model itself needs to be reconsidered. Over the past couple of years, I have started to wonder whether something similar has been happening in my own work, and perhaps more widely across psychology.

During much of 2025, I felt as though I was wading through treacle. There was a lot happening geopolitically that felt difficult to absorb, private practice itself seemed to be changing quickly, and I had a growing sense that regenerative practice needed to become a much more explicit part of what we were doing at Inspiring Psychology.

At the time, I thought the problem was largely one of clarity. I needed clearer messaging, better positioning and better words for something that I could sense but was grappling to articulate. So I bought a course that helped me put more language around what I was thinking, and that process eventually led me to record and release Private Practice in the WTF Era, a private podcast series exploring some of the changes I could see happening around psychological practice. Nearly a thousand people have since downloaded and listened to that series and, for a couple of months at least, I felt clearer.

But then more orc-shaped questions kept arriving.

There was increasing discussion about ‘AI’ and what it might mean for psychological work, both in terms of how psychological services are delivered and the economics that sit around them.

There were concerns about established professional training pathways, including the Stage 2 qualifications in occupational and counselling psychology in the UK, and what changes to those pathways might mean for people trying to enter the profession.

At the same time, colleagues were raising concerns with me about psychologists in training who were struggling to find jobs to move into after qualification. This was not confined to clinical psychology as reported recently in the news. Similar conversations were happening around occupational psychology, sport and exercise psychology and elsewhere, while even the paid and unpaid experiences people needed during training could be heavily oversubscribed.

Meanwhile, more psychologists were entering private practice, and many were doing so much earlier in their careers. The British Psychological Society asked Dr Esther Cole and me to develop a course on flourishing in private practice, and I was also being contacted by people thinking about strategic workforce development and asking bigger questions about the longer term development of the psychological workforce.

At Inspiring Psychology, a different kind of work was arriving too. Larger psychology practices, charities and associations were asking me to support them with strategic organisational development, including the development of new products and services, the reframing of their missions and questions about how their organisations needed to evolve.

Within the TPPA community, our conversations were also stretching well beyond the mechanics of running a practice. We were talking about what people cared about in the world, about activism, about where professional responsibility begins and ends, about the relationship between earning a living and contributing to something larger, and about what it might mean for a psychological practice to participate in restoring rather than simply responding to the systems around it.

All of this was happening against the backdrop of another extraordinary summer in Europe. For part of it I had effectively decamped into our air-conditioned kitchen, watching the garden becoming progressively more yellow and the trees visibly struggling in the heat. It became harder to think about the future of psychological practice as though it existed separately from the wider conditions in which we are all living.

None of these things, on their own, gave me an answer. Together, though, they started to feel like an accumulation of data points that no longer fitted neatly into the question I had been asking.

Perhaps the problem was not simply, how do we help psychologists build better private practices?

Perhaps the bigger problem was: our traditional model of professional development has been designed around progression through relatively stable, predefined pathways, while the work increasingly being asked of us requires judgement, authorship and adaptation along pathways that don't yet exist.

A question psychology has been sitting with for decades

Through this time period, I found myself returning to work that had first been published nearly forty years ago.

In 1989, applied psychologist Dr Derek Mowbray authored the MAS Review of Clinical Psychology and set out a framework describing three broad levels of psychological work.

At Level 1 sits the everyday relational and psychological support that many people can provide. Derek labelled this as, “I help”. 

At Level 2 sits structured and often protocol-based intervention, including therapy programmes, assessments and other established forms of psychological delivery - “I treat”. 

Level 3 is different. It is discretionary, strategic work that requires psychologists to draw flexibly from across psychological theory and their own professional judgement in order to respond to complex situations where there may be no standard protocol to follow - “I lead”. 

What struck me when I returned to Derek’s work was how long-standing this problem actually was.

By 2009, twenty years after the original review, Derek was still expressing concern that too much psychological capability remained concentrated in Level 2 delivery. His vision had been much bigger. He had proposed ways for psychologists to contribute more strategically to health, wellbeing, prevention, policy and wider systems, yet decades later we are still having remarkably similar conversations about highly trained practitioners spending enormous amounts of their professional lives delivering work designed elsewhere.

In the NHS and other parts of the UK public sector that may take the form of protocolised interventions within tightly prescribed services. In private practice it can look different on the surface, but still carry much of the same underlying structure: a full diary of one-to-one work, assessments, reports, another therapy modality, more clients, perhaps an associate or two or more.

All of this can be valuable work and can do enormous good, but it can also keep a practitioner overwhelmingly occupied with delivery. 

The cost of that can be surprisingly easy to miss, precisely because a full diary can look like success. A practitioner can spend years fully occupied by work that only happens when they are present, while the ideas, relationships, methodologies or more strategic contribution that only they could develop remain largely undeveloped. When referral patterns, organisational priorities or market conditions change, a model that once felt secure can leave remarkably little capacity to respond.

Delivery also has an important quality that strategic work often does not. It gives us a degree of certainty. There is a client, an appointment, a recognised intervention, a professional framework and usually a clearer sense of what happens next.

In contrast, during an email exchange in 2025, Derek made the following pithy observation: “Level 3 work is, by definition, uncertain.” 

That sentence has stayed with me because uncertainty is exactly what so many practitioners are trying to avoid when they think about what comes next. Psychologists spend years learning how to become competent within increasingly sophisticated areas of expertise. We develop knowledge, learn methods, qualify, specialise and become more experienced. There are pathways to follow and markers that tell us we are progressing.

Strategic work asks something different of us. It asks us to exercise judgement where there is no protocol, to make sense of complexity, decide what matters, connect ideas that may not have been connected before, and sometimes create a response rather than select one that already exists.

That is a very different kind of professional development. 

A stable ladder in an unstable world

Last year, I started imagining Derek’s model in another way. His original framework was progressive, and more recent articles continued to highlight a progressive, hierarchical model. As psychologists developed, the intention was that they would move up the career ladder increasingly towards Level 3 work, while other parts of the workforce could take on more Level 2 delivery. But the more I looked at the practices around me, the less convinced I became that a career ladder was the right metaphor for the world we now inhabit.

The practitioners doing some of the most interesting work were not abandoning Level 1 or Level 2. They were moving between them flexibly. Someone might work deeply with an individual, develop a programme for a community, advise an organisation strategically and collaborate across sectors on a much larger systemic problem. These different forms of work were not replacing one another. They were nested inside one another. So I started drawing the model as a series of nested circles instead.

For me, this was less about inventing another rung on a professional ladder and more about recognising a different orientation to practice, one that is regenerative and in which psychologists work across traditional boundaries, connecting people, communities, disciplines and sectors in ways that restore capacity rather than mostly treating the consequences when systems fail.

It also reflected something else that had been bothering me about conventional career development. The traditional ladder assumes a relatively stable world in which you qualify, progress, accumulate expertise and move through recognisable roles. But what happens when the institutions themselves are unstable, when career pathways are wholly disrupted, when technology vastly alters how services are delivered, when previously reliable sources of work disappear overnight, or when communities face problems that do not fit neatly inside one profession or one service?

A stable ladder becomes less useful when the ground underneath it is moving.

But even that still left me with a question.

If psychologists have been talking about the need to move beyond delivery for decades, why do some practitioners make that transition while so many others remain caught on the professional treadmill? 

What the practitioners who move beyond delivery do differently?

I realised that I had been spending a lot of time examining the problem. Why were psychologists still getting caught in Level 2 work? Why did so many experienced practitioners feel restless, constrained or bored despite having spent years developing their expertise? Why, in private practice, could someone build something that looked very successful from the outside and still feel as though most of their time was being consumed by work they did not want to keep doing indefinitely?

Instead of continuing to ask why so many psychologists remained caught in delivery, I started looking much more closely at the practitioners who did not.

I have had the privilege of working alongside many of these people over the past eight years, through coaching, twelve cohorts of The Psychology Practice Accelerator and the professional community that has grown around our work. This is not a formal research study, but my observations as an occupational psychologist who has spent years alongside people while their work develops.

When I look across them now, I can see a pattern much more clearly than I could when I first created TPPA. They have not just become more expert and ‘better at business’. They have become more self-authoring. They have worked intentionally on their self-leadership, become more willing to trust their own professional judgement, and learned to notice the questions, patterns and problems that matter to them rather than waiting for somebody else to define the next professional pathway.

They have integrated their experience, their expertise, the literature, their values and what they can see happening in the communities around them, and from that they have begun developing ideas, perspectives, methodologies, products and services that are distinctly their own.

What that looks like in practice

Some of these practitioners have developed highly recognisable bodies of work over a number of years. Michelle Minnikin, for example, brought together her organisational experience, psychological knowledge and observations about the socialisation of women to develop her work around deconditioning and Good Girl Deprogramming. Dr Hannah Bryan integrated her experience in EMDR and coaching into EMDR-informed coaching.

But those are only two examples of a much broader pattern. Across the psychologists and psychological practitioners we have worked with, I have seen people develop new ways of understanding and responding to neurodivergence, identity, work, leadership, psychological safety, systemic injustice and organisational life.

I have seen them create new assessment and support pathways, build communities, influence policy and systems, develop methodologies and intellectual property, work across professional and sector boundaries, and bring psychological thinking into places where it had not previously had much influence.

What interests me particularly is not the form any one of these practices takes. It is the developmental process underneath them.

These practitioners have become increasingly willing to stay with the questions for which there is no prescribed pathway. They have become curious about what they are noticing, what their experience is teaching them, what seems to be missing from existing conversations, what happens when they bring different strands of knowledge together, and what the people and communities they care about serving actually need.

Rather than needing to answer all of those questions in advance, they have brought them into relationship with the world. Through conversation, research, experimentation, writing, services, methodologies and relationships, they have put emerging ideas into practice, paid attention to what happened in response, and allowed what they learned to shape what came next.

Over time, something that may once have looked like a collection of interests, experiences and half-formed ideas starts to become more coherent. It starts to become a distinctive body of work.

The seduction of a clear pathway

We often look at practitioners who are known for a particular methodology, idea or field of work and assume they must have started with an unusual degree of clarity, as though they knew what they were building before they began. 

But when I look at the practitioners I have worked alongside, what I see is a much more iterative process. They may have begun with a question that would not leave them alone, an idea they wanted to explore, or a problem they cared deeply about, and then learned more by researching, experimenting, talking to people and paying attention to what happened in response.

I think this is part of what makes the familiar professional pathway so seductive. Expertise development tends to come with clear milestones. There are qualifications to complete, accreditations to achieve, areas of specialism to deepen and recognisable markers of progress along the way.

When you are developing work of your own, those markers are much less obvious. There may be no curriculum, job description or established route telling you what to do first, whether you are on the right track or where the work will ultimately lead.

So perhaps the question is not whether we can remove that uncertainty altogether, but whether we can develop the confidence and judgement to work intelligently within it.

Diversification was never the whole story

For a long time, I described some of what we were doing in TPPA as helping psychologists to diversify their practices.

That was not wrong. Many people did become less reliant on one-to-one delivery and developed groups, programmes, organisational work, teaching, consultancy, writing, training, communities and other ways of bringing their psychology into the world.

But I can see now that diversification is much too small a description of the transformation. You can diversify a practice without changing the underlying way you practise at all. You can have five different income streams and still spend most of your time delivering somebody else’s methods, responding to work that arrives through somebody else’s systems, or creating services because they appear commercially sensible rather than because they form part of something you genuinely want to contribute.

Diversification may be one consequence of a practice becoming more strategic and regenerative, but it is not the developmental process itself.

What I was seeing was something deeper. These practitioners were becoming more capable of authoring their professional lives and their work, and that matters for reasons that go well beyond personal fulfilment or professional differentiation.

Practitioners who can notice what is changing around them, develop thoughtful responses, test those responses in the world and adapt as they learn are better able to meet emerging social needs. They are also less dependent on any single role, institution, referral pathway or established model of practice continuing to work in the way it always has.

In that sense, this kind of development creates resilience at several levels. It strengthens the practitioner’s ability to navigate uncertainty, the capacity of organisations and communities to respond to changing needs, and the profession’s ability to keep evolving in relationship with the world around it.

From expertise development to Leading Practitioner development

This was the point at which something finally clicked for me.

Psychology gives us very well established pathways for becoming more expert. We can specialise, train in another modality, gain another qualification, deepen our knowledge of a population, condition, methodology or field, and all of that matters enormously.

There is, however, another developmental pathway that we talk about much less explicitly. It is the pathway from expertise towards self-authorship, from knowing a field towards developing a perspective within it, and from delivering established work towards becoming able to create thoughtful responses to the problems we can see.

It involves developing the judgement and confidence to move when there is no pre-defined route, bringing together what we know with what we notice and care about, and allowing ideas to develop through research, experimentation, relationships and response.

The question gradually changes from, “What am I qualified to deliver?” to something more like, “What is the work I am increasingly here to lead?” 

I have come to think of this as the development of a Leading Practitioner.

A Leading Practitioner is not simply a more senior psychologist, an influencer, somebody with the largest social media audience, or a rare professional unicorn who happens to possess qualities the rest of us do not.

They are a practitioner who can explore an idea without demanding certainty about where it will end up, learn from the response, build relationships around the work, and continue adapting as both the work and the world around them change.

Over time, those ideas, perspectives, methodologies, relationships and pieces of work begin to form something more coherent. Perhaps most importantly, it is never really finished, because the practitioner continues to develop, the work continues to develop, and the world around them continues to change.

The pattern was already there

Once I could see this distinction, I started looking differently at Inspiring Psychology too.

I originally created The Psychology Practice Accelerator as a talent development programme for psychologists in private practice. Over the years I have used different language for the work we were doing: private practice development, diversification, regenerative practice, leadership, strategic practice and community.

All of those ideas still matter, but none of them on their own quite explained what I could see happening.

Looking back over twelve cohorts of TPPA, I can now see that the most significant transformations were not simply people learning to market themselves more effectively, becoming more efficient or adding new income streams. They were developmental.

The work had already become about the development of Leading Practitioners before I had the language to describe it that way. I think Inspiring Psychology has therefore been going through its own version of the professional revolution I described at the start of this article.

We are becoming much more intentional about supporting psychologists and psychological practitioners to develop themselves as well as their expertise, to integrate what they know into bodies of work of their own, to shape their practices around the work they most want to lead, and to develop the relationships, visibility and authority that allow that work to travel.

Some Leading Practitioners will work entirely independently. Some will remain inside organisations. Many will move between both. Some will build programmes, communities, methodologies or research, some will work at the level of organisations, systems or public policy, and some will continue to do significant amounts of individual work alongside all of that.

Psychology needs another developmental pathway

When I zoom out again, this feels bigger to me than a question about our own business. The professional environment psychologists are entering is becoming less stable. Established training and career pathways are changing, technology is altering the way psychological services are accessed and delivered, the economics of private practice are shifting, and the communities we serve are dealing with increasingly complex social, ecological and systemic pressures.

Many of those problems will not be solved simply by delivering more of the same work, however expertly we deliver it.

We still need outstanding psychological practitioners. We need depth of expertise, excellent therapy, assessment, research and evidence-based intervention.

I think we also need many more psychologists who know how to take what they know and create with it. Practitioners who can identify emerging needs before a formal service exists to meet them, form and test perspectives of their own, work strategically and across boundaries, and build something useful without waiting for somebody else to define the pathway first.

That does not mean abandoning professional rigour, ethics or evidence. It means being able to carry those things with us into work that is less certain, less prescribed and perhaps more responsive to the conditions in which people are actually living.

Maybe one of the developmental challenges facing psychology now is therefore not simply, how do we produce more experts? 

It is also, how do we help more experts become authors, leaders and developers of work? 
 

Maybe clarity was never a destination after all

Which brings me back to The Lord of the Rings. I do not think becoming a Leading Practitioner means finally reaching the top of the mountain and achieving permanent clarity. There will still be the Shires, the forests and, most certainly, the orcs. There will be moments when the landscape opens up and everything feels obvious, and there will be other moments when we are deep inside something new and cannot yet see very far ahead.

The difference, perhaps, is not only that we become more capable of travelling. It is also that we stop imagining we are supposed to make the journey alone. 

After all, Frodo did not get very far because he became exceptionally good at navigating Mordor by himself. The quest depended on the Fellowship, with different people bringing different strengths, perspectives, resources and forms of courage.

I think there is something important in that for professional development too. Developing work of your own requires greater self-authorship and the confidence to exercise judgement when there is no prescribed pathway, but self-authorship is not the same thing as doing everything alone. Much of the work I have seen develop most powerfully has done so in relationship, through conversations that sharpen ideas, colleagues who ask better questions, communities that widen our perspective, and the people we are trying to serve continually changing our understanding of what the work needs to become.

Perhaps becoming a Leading Practitioner is therefore partly about becoming more capable of travelling through uncertainty, and partly about becoming part of the kinds of professional communities that make that journey possible.

Author: Wendy Kendall is Principal Coach at Inspiring Psychology Practices and creator of The Psychology Practice Accelerator.