Read your peers' discussion posts and respond to at least two of them. What questions do you have about the requirements for their profession? What resources or individuals are you aware of that could help them clarify their career goals or requirements for their field?
Be sure to provide substantive responses to help your peers build on their learning and reference any relevant assigned readings, additional resources, or professional literature to support your response.
To participate in research, licensure is not required though some agencies, depending on what their research is about, do require knowledge on specific areas that might need certification or additional coursework or workshops in order to be qualified for a job position. During my research of possible career options I learned that most require a PhD degree with a minimum of 5 to 8 years of experience. I saw a lot of positions also requiring grant-writing knowledge, which I now have placed on my educational to-do list.
Due to my current goal of influencing social change by breaking stigma regarding to the LGBT population, I would need to be hired in the Public Service field, which involves working for federal agencies, like the Department of Health and Human Services. I still need to explore further about agencies that relate to policy changes regarding this population, though. I would also need to be open to various research topics because according to Haegerich and Okagaki (2010), working for a federal research agency requires focus on topics that address current public needs, therefore it is more of a generalist approach requiring knowledge on numerous topics.
I am currently going one stepping stone at a time because it seems overwhelming all I need to achieve in order to become an expert practitioner-scholar in the field. For now I will continue to concentrate on my studies and begin searching for a part-time job in a research-related field so that I can begin to understand how it works exactly. My questions regarding being a researcher lie in how does one perform in an organization.