How useful is research experience for non-academic psychology careers?

This is a great question, and the answer is a challenging “it depends!” Some non-academic careers are very research intensive. In these pathways, academic research experience can help to develop competitive competencies. In others, direct research experience may be less important to the job tasks. That said, research experience helps to develop transferrable skills such as learning to collect and manage data in ethical ways, use data to make useful insights, and fosters groupwork on complex tasks. As with above, a great exercise is to look up potential jobs of interest ahead of time. Do some internet searching on key words, and see what jobs pop up! You can then track required and desired qualifications posted in job ads of interest. They should tell you if there are specific competencies that would be helpful, such as research. To help track this information, you can make a copy of this spreadsheet and track information from jobs that are of interest to you.