Preparing trainees for lifelong competence: Creating a communitarian training culture

Professional psychology training programs exert a powerful influence on the ways in which trainees come to appreciate and respond to the ethical mandate to ensure their own professional competence. If training psychologists overemphasize individualistic conceptions of lifelong competence, then trainees may be at risk for professional isolation if and when they experience problems of professional competence. In this article, we describe the virtues of communitarianism as an important shift from individual to community conceptions of competence obligations. We introduce the Communitarian Training Culture (CTC), a training ethos that embraces and supports the evolving culture of competence in psychology while infusing it with a distinctly interdependent and communal character. We describe the contours of an effective CTC and provide specific recommendations for psychology training leaders interested in enhancing the communitarian character of their program.