Advocacy as a Professional Competency in Psychology

Advocacy skills and training experiences are important for psychologists to enact individual- and systems-level change. Despite calls for advocacy training experiences, there are few objectively measurable skills for the inclusion of advocacy as a training competency. The purpose of this article is to provide a rationale for advocacy as a separate and measurable competency, describe advocacy training experiences, and outline objective benchmarks for attainment of advocacy competencies. Overall, the benchmarks included in this article can help prepare psychology trainees to be effective agents in using advocacy skills to address their concerns in the lay and professional worlds, and especially attend to social justice concerns.