A Scientist-Practitioner Perspective of the Internship Match Imbalance: The Stairway to Competence

This paper focuses on the supply and demand imbalance from a scientist-practitioner perspective, emphasizing competency development. A conceptual framework, the Stairway Model, illustrates the basic steps leading to emerging professional competence and stimulates research leading to thoughtful solutions to the internship match imbalance. Three immediate recommendations are offered. Doctoral programs should be (a) held accountable for their match rates, and (b) required to publicly disclose program and national match rates. Third, research must be conducted to determine factors that influence match rate and competency development. Concerns with other commonly proposed solutions are also discussed.