Addressing the supply of psychologists in the workforce: Is focusing principally on demand sound economics?

The growth of the psychologist workforce offers greater human capital for delivering psychological services. Workforce expansion also may contribute to excessive services or psychologists' employment concerns. Our survey revealed that interns and Internship Directors perceive the supply and demand workforce imbalance as one of the most important problems, and possibly the most challenging problem, facing professional psychology in the next decade. Organized psychology has predominantly focused on options for approaching work-force imbalances by exploring avenues for increasing the demand for psychologists' services and broadening the scope of their professional activities. Additional attention to moderating the supply of psychologists and current training levels is perceived as an important and potentially more successful means of addressing imbalances between the workforce supply and the demand for psychologists' services. Internship directors were pessimistic about the impact of most of the resolutions of the 1997 Supply and Demand Conference in addressing workforce imbalances.