Associate Training Director, Practicum

Description

Associate Training Director, Practicum

Lorenz Clinic of Family Psychology — Southwest Minneapolis Metro

Who This Is For

You have been doing supervision long enough that your attention has shifted. You are less interested in your own caseload than in the conditions that produce good psychotherapists. You have opinions about what those conditions require — and you have probably felt the frustration of working inside settings where those conditions keep getting structurally compromised.

You know the practicum window is one of the most formative periods in a clinician's development. You have watched programs treat it as a credentialing exercise. You have tried to do something different inside the constraints you were given, and you have felt the friction that comes with having a point of view.

You are not looking for a leadership role because you want fewer sessions. You are looking for one because the formation work has become the work — and you want to do it inside an institution that has built something designed to hold it.

If that paragraph described you, keep reading. If you're primarily looking for a title change or a lighter caseload, this is probably not the right fit.

About Lorenz Clinic

Lorenz Clinic is a private outpatient practice and psychotherapy training institute serving children, families, and adults across seven locations in the southwest Minneapolis metro. We use both words deliberately. The clinical work funds and grounds the mission. The institute is what gives the clinical work its shape, its meaning, and its reach.

We treat systems, not symptoms. We develop clinicians, not just employees. We hold clinicians so clinicians can hold clients — a principle that runs through every level of the organization, from the therapy room to the supervisory relationship to the architecture of the training program itself.

Our approach draws on Winnicott's holding environment, Bowlby's secure base, Bion's work on containment and group dynamics, Bateson's systems epistemology, and Falender's supervision doctrine — not as historical references but as living frameworks actively applied in supervision, consultation, seminar design, and organizational life.

The practicum program sits at the base of a vertically integrated formation ladder that runs from master's practicum through Post-Master's Fellowship, doctoral internship, and postdoctoral fellowship. The practicum rung is not preparatory. It is the first serious encounter with clinical formation — and it sets the developmental trajectory for everything above it. A practicum student who is well-held in her first year arrives at the Post-Master's Fellowship ready for what it asks. One who isn't, doesn't. The ATD for Practicum is responsible for that difference.

The Position

The Associate Training Director for Practicum is a system-wide leadership role. It sits on the clinic's leadership team, reports directly to the CEO with a dotted line to the COO, and operates in a formal dyad with the Director of Clinical Operations. This is not a program management seat. It is a stewardship seat with institution-wide reach.

The ATD holds the master's-level practicum program across all clinic sites through a corps of site-based supervisors whom she consults, develops, and holds to the formation framework. She carries a small direct supervision load but functions primarily as the architect of the system above it: providing reflective consultation to the supervisory corps, maintaining fidelity across sites, and ensuring supervision operates as a genuine developmental discipline rather than a compliance exercise.

The ATD also serves as a reflective consultant to one site-level unit — participating in the organizational architecture through which reflective practice is held at scale across the institution.

The central intellectual task is scaffolding: moving practicum students, over a 9–12 month arc, toward the competencies required for Post-Master's Fellowship entry. This requires holding two developmental pictures simultaneously — where a trainee is, and where she needs to be in twelve to eighteen months — and designing the structures, seminar experiences, and formative relationships that close that gap. It is not remediation. It is architecture.

The practicum-to-PMF transition is not a handoff. It is a seam that the ATD for Practicum and the ATD for the Post-Master's Fellowship hold together. The supervision architecture is in place and the supervisor corps is strong. The developmental scaffolding system, the seminar arc, and the practicum-to-PMF transition framework are yours to build.

Core Responsibilities

• Hold and develop the practicum supervisory corps: providing regular reflective consultation to site-based supervisors, maintaining formation fidelity across sites, and functioning as the resource supervisors turn to when the work gets hard
• Design and steward the scaffolding system that moves practicum students toward PMF entry competencies — including supervision structures, seminar arc, and formative feedback loops across the full placement year
• Coordinate university relationships — serving as the primary point of contact for training directors across partner programs, maintaining placement agreements, and providing substantive developmental feedback on placed students at mid-placement and end of placement
• Manage the administrative infrastructure: scheduling, hour tracking, placement assignments, semester coordination, and the operational continuity that holds the formation environment in place
• Carry a small direct practicum supervision load
• Facilitate the practicum seminar: integrating theory with lived practice, holding group process and tone as curriculum, and using here-and-now dynamics as teaching material rather than problems to manage
• Conduct ongoing, transparent competency evaluation of practicum students — visible to trainees, legible to university partners, and actionable when standards require it
• Serve as reflective consultant to one site-level pod
• Collaborate as a peer with the ATD for the Post-Master's Fellowship on the practicum-to-PMF developmental arc
• Contribute to the broader intellectual community: grand rounds, cross-program consultation, and the growing research and publication program

What We're Looking For

The ATD must be skilled at holding anxiety without displacing it, maintaining structure without rigidity, and building formation environments that are simultaneously demanding and genuinely safe — at multiple levels of the system simultaneously.

We are looking for someone who:

• Has supervised master's-level clinicians in a psychotherapy setting and can describe the formation theory underneath the practice — not just what she did, but what she was trying to accomplish developmentally. Has a specific account of a supervisee she genuinely shaped, and can describe what that formation required of her personally.
• Has a coherent picture of what practicum-to-PMF readiness means clinically and could articulate it without prompting. Not "completing APA benchmarks" — something more specific: what does a practicum student need to have metabolized, relationally and epistemologically, before she is ready for what the PMF asks?
• Has supervised supervisors, or is ready to. The primary holding relationship in this role is with the supervisory corps. The ATD needs to be at least one developmental level above the work she is overseeing.
• Treats the supervisory alliance as a named and tended competency — not a background condition. Knows how to build it, monitor it, and repair it when it ruptures.
• Brings genuine multicultural humility into the supervisory field — not as a module, but as an orientation. Understands that identity, power, and cultural context are always present in supervision and that the safety of the formation environment depends in part on how those dynamics are named and held.
• Practices and thinks as a psychotherapist — clinical identity organized around depth, relational process, and second-order change, not primarily symptom reduction or psychoeducation. The ATD must already inhabit the register she is moving students toward.
• Can design a seminar around a developmental objective, not just a topic. Has held a cohort through a semester arc — including the middle, where the real developmental work happens.
• Monitors her own supervision practice with the same reflective scrutiny she asks of the clinicians she holds. The self-of-the-supervisor is a practice she maintains, not a concept she has taught.
• Has done real clinical work — community mental health, underserved populations, caseloads with genuine complexity. The formation she offers trainees has to be grounded in clinical experience that produced it the hard way. Candidates who have weathered real institutional pressure and stayed are strongly preferred over those who have trained exclusively in resource-rich settings.
• Has been formed by someone. The supervisor she became was shaped by the supervision she received, and she knows it.

Requirements

Required Qualifications

• Doctoral degree in psychology (PhD or PsyD) or equivalent from a regionally accredited program, OR a master's degree in Marriage and Family Therapy with a completed PhD.  A master's-level license without a doctoral degree does not meet the requirement for this role.
• Independent clinical licensure in Minnesota — LP or doctoral-level LMFT at the independent practice level — or documented eligibility
• Experience providing clinical supervision to pre-licensed clinicians with sufficient duration to have genuinely formed a supervisee, not just supervised one
• Grounding in systemic and relational models of psychotherapy; depth and second-order change orientation required
• Genuine comfort with the administrative dimensions of a training program: university coordination, placement logistics, hour tracking, and the operational work that holds everything else in place

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience providing consultation to supervisors, not just supervisees
• AAMFT Approved Supervisor status or active candidacy, pursued voluntarily beyond what licensure required
• Experience designing and facilitating graduate-level clinical seminars, including sustained cohort facilitation across a semester arc
• Evidence of field engagement beyond the local level: presentations, publications, professional association involvement
• Experience managing multiple university training program relationships simultaneously
• Clinical experience in community-based or outpatient settings serving diverse and underinsured populations
• Bilingual candidates are strongly encouraged — expanding access for underserved communities is central to our mission

A Note on Fit

The practicum program is where clinicians first encounter what formation actually asks of them. The ATD designs that encounter, protects its integrity, and ensures the first rung of the formation ladder is worthy of everything above it.

We are a community-based outpatient practice. We serve real families, accept reduced-fee clients as a matter of mission, and do this work at main street scale. That is a feature, not a limitation — the formation here is grounded in clinical reality in a way that resource-rich training environments cannot replicate. But it asks something specific of the people who hold it: the ability to sustain serious intellectual and formational work inside conditions that are demanding, sometimes constrained, and never cushy.

The right candidate has been doing formation work somewhere that couldn't fully hold it. She is not primarily motivated by the title — she is motivated by the possibility of doing the work she already cares about inside an institution that was designed to support it.

For that candidate, this is not a step away from serious professional life. It is a step toward the center of it.

Compensation and Structure

$106,000–$140,000 annually | W-2 | Full benefits

This role includes a clinical caseload. The ATD is a practicing psychotherapist, not a full-time administrator.

Primary in-person worksite: one of our southwest metro locations — Victoria, Chaska, Prior Lake, Rosemount, Minnetonka, Burnsville, or Wayzata, approximately 30–35 miles from downtown Minneapolis. Listed under Minneapolis for search visibility.

Process and Timeline

Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis. Target start date is late summer or early fall 2026, with flexibility for the right candidate.

To apply, submit a CV and cover letter at lorenzclinic.com/join-us.

The cover letter matters here. We are not looking for a statement of interest in supervision and training — we assume that. We are looking for a letter that demonstrates a theory of what the practicum window is for, a specific account of how a supervisory or mentoring relationship shaped your own formation, a place where you pushed against training norms and what came of it, and your understanding of what practicum-to-PMF readiness actually requires. A letter that is warm but takes no positions is a yellow flag. The right candidate has things to say. The letter is where she says them.

Finalists may be asked to provide a writing sample and a professional reference from a clinical supervisor or training colleague.

Lorenz Clinic is an equal opportunity employer committed to building a diverse and inclusive clinical community.

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