When Gaurika Gupta enrolled in a master’s program in applied psychology, she did not imagine a career that would take her inside a design agency, reading spreadsheets of consumer data and telling brands where the “white space” in the market lies. Yet that is exactly where she landed, and she says it is work she was always drawn to.Gupta’s first job out of graduate school was as a research analyst at Maven Magnet AI. Her second, and current, role is as a strategy planner at Please See//, a design company where she said her work “extends into corporates like Nielsen, Kantar” and other market research giants. Her job, she said, is to help companies understand not just what consumers want, but why they want it, then translate that understanding into products and messaging.“It’s really behavioural science,” Gupta said, regarding the work.She never trained for a design agency. But her path illustrates a shift now playing out across Indian higher education, where psychology, once seen mostly as a pipeline to clinical practice or academia, is being reshaped by demand from corporate India. Companies are hiring psychology graduates not just for counselling and HR desks, but for roles in people analytics, psychometric assessment, behavioural training, employee wellbeing and organisational development. And that demand, educators and students say, is feeding a surge of interest in the subject itself.The numbers bear that out. According to CUET registration data, Psychology registrations climbed to 32,875 in 2025, while the number of students who actually appeared for the paper rose from 20,547 in 2024 to 26,055 the following year. The increase places psychology among the more sought-after elective subjects in India’s centralised university entrance exam, a marked change from a decade ago, when the discipline was often viewed as a fallback choice.Part of that growth traces to the broader normalisation of mental health conversations in India, amplified by social media and a generation more willing to talk openly about therapy, anxiety and burnout. Reels and podcasts explaining cognitive biases, attachment styles and workplace burnout circulate widely among young people, feeding a general fascination with how the mind works even before students think about what a psychology degree might lead to professionally.But educators say career prospects, not just personal interest, are increasingly steering students toward the subject. A decade ago, counseling and academia were among the few established career paths for psychology graduates, with limited options available to those looking beyond these traditional fields. That calculus has changed as new roles have emerged across industries, creating opportunities for psychology graduates that did not exist when many of today’s professors were students.On the rise“There is certainly an upward swing in prospective applicants, both immediately after school as well as at the post graduate level,” said Prof. Pulkit Khanna, Dean of the Jindal Institute of Behavioural Sciences at O.P. Jindal Global University. Khanna said the institute has seen roughly a 7 to 10% increase in applicants for its master's courses in Applied Psychology and Psychosocial Rehabilitation, since it began offering them after the pandemic, a notable rise given the programmes have limited intake.Khanna attributed the trend to several overlapping forces: greater public awareness of psychology as a field, the opening of career paths at the intersection of psychology with different fields, and a recognition among employers that understanding human behaviour is central to running any organisation.“Most organisations today acknowledge that as they chase their bottom-line and revenue numbers, people are at the heart of most processes,” Khanna said. “To bring about desirable behavioural change, whether in consumer or employees, we need to better understand human behaviour.”That recognition has translated into recruiters showing up at this institute who would not have a decade ago. Khanna named KPMG, Airtel Business, ITC Limited, Vodafone and Policybazaar among established companies that have hired graduates and taken on interns in recent years, alongside newer organisations such as Maven Magnet, Thomas Assessment and Grant Thornton Bharat.The roles those graduates fill go well beyond the counselling and clinical pathways. Khanna said job profiles now include sales training, user design, performance coaching, research analysis, psychometric testing, and even training large language models, an emerging category of work tied to the rise of artificial intelligence.That diversification has informed the curriculum of the institute, she said. Since it began offering degree programmes, the institute has added niche specialisations such as forensic and investigative psychology and industrial and organisational psychology, alongside longer-established tracks like child psychology. Field visits, internships and apprenticeship modules have been built into the coursework from the outset, Khanna said, and the institute makes a point of involving industry practitioners whenever a new curriculum is designed.Cross-disciplinary electives rooted in psychology have also become a draw for students outside the discipline altogether. Khanna said more than a thousand students across the university sign up each term for courses that cut across psychology, business, law, design, policy, architecture and environmental science.Looking ahead, Khanna said she believes the disruption caused by artificial intelligence, far from displacing psychology graduates, will increase demand for their skills.“With the disruptive role of AI and the volatile nature of careers, I truly believe that a deeper understanding of human behaviour as a skill is here to stay,” she said. “The future potential in terms of jobs will lie at the intersection of disciplines and with those who can blend the power of psychology to address the wicked problems of the world.”Why companies are hiringThat blending of disciplines is precisely what has drawn employers to the field, according to Rafia Reshi, General Manager for new initiatives and special projects at Amity University Online. Reshi argues that psychologists have become indispensable to modern business because so much of what companies do, from product design to marketing to workplace culture, ultimately comes down to human behaviour.“Corporates need psychologists because every business decision ultimately involves people,” Reshi said. “Understanding behaviour helps organisations design products, services and experiences that are not just commercially successful, but genuinely relevant to the people they serve.”On the consumer side, Reshi said businesses have moved past treating customers as data points on a spreadsheet. “Today, businesses cannot afford to look at consumers only through numbers and demographics,” she said. “Psychologists bring an understanding of the motivations, emotions and behaviours behind those numbers, helping companies understand not just what people choose, but why they choose it.”That same logic, she said, applies inside companies as much as outside them. “Psychologists have a valuable role to play in the corporate world because businesses are built around human behaviour, from how employees work and collaborate to how consumers make decisions,” Reshi said. “Bringing behavioural expertise into organisations can help companies make smarter, more human centered decisions.”Reshi put the case in blunter commercial terms as well. “Companies spend millions trying to understand their customers,” she said. “Psychologists are trained to understand the human behaviour behind those customers. That is why behavioural science should not sit at the margins of business, it should be part of how businesses think.”Inside the HR playbookFor organisations already living with this shift, the change did not arrive as a single dramatic trigger, but as a gradual recognition that employee wellbeing needed real infrastructure. Shristi Jain, an HR professional at a leading recruiting firm in Delhi NCR, said there is a discernible rise in the number of companies hiring students from psychology and behavioural sciences backgrounds. “I think I have looked at as many psychologists’ CVs in the last two years as I might have in the previous ten years combined.”Jain pushed back on the idea that hiring psychologists amounts to what critics call “wellness washing,” a symbolic gesture that leaves long working hours untouched. If employees are stretched thin, she said, the problem lies in staffing and planning, not in the presence of a wellbeing program. “It’s not wellness washing,” she said. “It is basic care of an employee, and that’s very important and many companies realize that now.”Organisations are increasingly drawn to psychologists with formal training rather than a general humanities background, she said, and a newly self-aware Gen Z workforce is now asking directly, in job interviews, what a company does for employee wellbeing.Options open for studentsFor students still weighing their options, the corporate pull sits alongside more traditional motivations. Aarzoo Arora, who is pursuing a master’s in clinical psychology at Christ University, said she was drawn to the subject in part because of its range. Psychology, she said, “offers diverse career opportunities beyond just understanding the human mind and behaviour, spanning clinical settings, hospitals, schools, nonprofits, research, HR and corporate wellbeing.”Arora, who is based in Delhi, said she wants a career that lets her work directly with people while keeping the door open to research, assessment and counselling. She sees real, if still developing, opportunities for psychology graduates in the corporate sector, particularly in organisational psychology, employee wellbeing, learning and development, and behavioural research, as companies pay closer attention to workplace mental health.She hopes to specialise in an area of clinical psychology while staying open to research and to opportunities in organisational and corporate mental health. “I eventually want to build a career that combines clinical work, research and mental health advocacy.”