Description
Post-Master's Fellowship | Lorenz Clinic | Minneapolis–St. Paul Area | Full-time, on-site | $125,000–$160,000
The Position
The Post-Master's Fellowship takes pre-licensed master's clinicians to independent licensure across two years, on the LICSW, LMFT, and LPCC tracks. The work of this role is not the clinical caseload itself. It is the conditions under which that clinical work is done well, and under which a master's-level clinician becomes an independent practitioner. The role works on the formation, not only in the service, and it does so at a level of depth the master's preparation arc does not itself reach. Taking graduate-trained clinicians to independent practice through excellent community-based psychotherapy training, inside a real community mental health clinic, is the center of it.
The role is, in plain terms, the training director of the Fellowship. The formal title is Associate Training Director, one of several training directors who hold the clinic's various training placements. This person is the steady center of the Fellowship: beyond their supervisor, the one fellows know, bring things to, and orient themselves by. The work is done through presence more than policy.
The role owns the Fellowship cohort seminar and holds curricular coherence across the two years, so the sequence builds rather than accumulates. It keeps fellows engaged and genuinely known; a fellow who becomes peripheral to the civic fabric of the program in the first year rarely recovers it in the second. And it runs the supervision operation around the cohort: supervisor assignment and matching, coordination across sites, standards, and accountability for the quality of supervision fellows receive.
The cohort is also a professional microcosm. Fellows learn to become citizens of a clinical organization, to work with its boundaries, its authority, and its shared obligations, by participating in one at a scale they can see whole, and by having that experience made available for reflection rather than left unexamined. This is not a secondary aim. Autonomy after licensure is only as durable as the civic capacity underneath it.
The Fellowship is the second half of a longer developmental arc. Most fellows arrive having completed a practicum year in the same clinic, so a clinician's formation here runs from graduate school through independent licensure across roughly three years. That full arc is held by two coequal directors, one for the practicum program and one for the Fellowship. This role holds the Fellowship, and the two directors coordinate closely on curricular coherence so the practicum year builds toward what the Fellowship requires; neither directs the other, and neither owns the other's program.
The position reports to the CEO. It works closely with the Director of Clinical Operations, who holds the operational and administrative machinery around training (records, hour tracking, scheduling infrastructure, the training calendar), and it coordinates with the practicum program's leadership on the coherence of the arc. The role has a standing weekly hour with the CEO and works with an established supervisor corps across the clinic's sites.
About Lorenz Clinic
Lorenz Clinic is an outpatient practice and psychotherapy training institute serving children, families, and adults across the southwest Twin Cities metro. Approximately 130 staff work across the clinic's sites, and at any given time roughly 20 percent of clinical staff are in active training or supervision.
Lorenz pioneered Minnesota's first organized, competency-based post-master's fellowship, a model since replicated across the region. The clinic considers it its most enduring contribution to the profession, and it remains the center of gravity of the institution.
The clinic treats systems, not symptoms, and the same conviction shapes how it forms clinicians. Object relations and attachment theory, containment and group relations, mentalization and epistemic trust, systems epistemology, and competency-based supervision are working frameworks here, applied in supervision, consultation, and seminar design rather than cited as history.
Although its locations are only 15-30 minutes from downtown Minneapolis, Lorenz serves a predominantly suburban and rural population, including many clients without insurance. This is central to the Fellowship rather than incidental to it. Fellows are being formed to do depth work inside a real community mental health clinic: to hold complex, high-acuity, and underinsured cases, under genuine production conditions, and to do it well. Reduced-fee services are not a footnote to the clinic's mission; they are part of it.
Key Responsibilities
- Hold the two-year Fellowship arc as its steadiest presence and organizing center, calibrated to where each cohort actually is rather than to where the calendar says it should be.
- Own the Fellowship seminar: a protected full-day seminar each month, eight hours with the full cohort, built around the sixteen APA Competency Benchmark domains, combining didactic instruction, structured experiential learning, an invited practitioner-scholar, and small-group discussion. Design, sequence, faculty, and delivery. Roughly twelve full teaching days per year, and the intellectual centerpiece of the program. Invited presenters are practitioner-scholars of national standing.
- Maintain curricular coherence across the two years, and coordinate with the practicum program's leadership so the full graduate-school-to-licensure arc coheres rather than fragmenting at the seam between the two programs.
- Use the cohort as an experiential learning environment, treating the group's own life as material for development, so fellows learn to work within a clinical organization and not only within a caseload.
- Run supervisor operations: supervisor assignment and matching, coordination across sites, standards and consistency, and accountability for the quality of supervision fellows receive.
- Steward the broader training structure: eight hours of supervision per fellow per month (four with a doctorally prepared psychologist, four with a professional supervisor); monthly case consultation held deliberately separate from evaluation, so fellows can bring the cases they are genuinely uncertain about; a weekly didactic hour shared with doctoral interns; and monthly grand rounds.
- Make advancement, remediation, and occasional exit decisions within the Fellowship, on time and on principle, without escalating them upward by default.
- Provide administrative supervision to the fellows: the managerial line, distinct from clinical supervision, which sits with others.
- Carry a clinical caseload. The Associate Training Director is a practicing psychotherapist, not a full-time administrator. The caseload is real but bounded, and smaller than a full-time clinician's by design.
- Draw on the operational and administrative infrastructure the Director of Clinical Operations holds (hour tracking, records, the training calendar, scheduling), so that this load is carried by the operational axis rather than displacing the developmental work the role exists to do.
What We're Looking For
The clinic is considerably more interested in a small number of capacities and experiences that run much deeper than credentials. It is looking for someone who:
- Practices and thinks as a psychotherapist in a specific sense: clinical identity organized around depth, relational process, and second-order change rather than symptom reduction or psychoeducation. The Fellowship forms clinicians who work experientially, using the therapeutic relationship itself as an instrument of change through attunement, rupture, and repair. This is a matter of register and theory of change, not credential or modality: a master's-licensed clinician may embody it fully, and a doctorally licensed one may not. The Associate Training Director must already inhabit the register they are forming in others.
- Has done real clinical work in community conditions. Much of what a fellow is learning is how to hold depth work inside a community mental health clinic: a full caseload, genuine complexity, underinsured and high-acuity clients, real production pressure. A director who has only ever practiced and supervised in well-resourced academic or cash-pay settings cannot form fellows for that, because they have not had to hold it themselves. Substantial experience practicing in community, public, or comparably under-resourced settings is among the things the clinic weights most heavily in this search.
- Has carried real professional responsibility in demanding conditions. A full caseload of genuine complexity, a program or team under strain, decisions that could not be deferred to someone else. The role asks a person to be responsible for other clinicians' development under real institutional pressure, and the strongest candidates have carried comparable weight before, in settings where the work was hard and the support was thin.
- Knows reflective supervision or mentalization-based work from the inside, as something practiced or been formed by, not cited. Candidates from either tradition will find much here familiar, and will have room to use it, in their own supervisory relationships and in holding the conditions for a program and supervisory corps working in the same register. This is among the qualities the clinic most values.
- Teaches well, and treats teaching as a competency rather than an incidental duty. Teaching is a named functional competency in the APA framework and is held as one here. The seminar requires someone who has built curriculum, held a room, and knows the difference between covering material and teaching it.
- Has formed a supervisee, not merely supervised one, and can say specifically what changed and what it required of them.
- Can articulate what has to change in a clinician between the first day of the Fellowship and independent practice, without prompting.
- Can hold a cohort, not only a caseload. Has taken a group through a full arc and knows what happens in the middle, where the developmental work occurs. Can read what is happening between people in a room and use it rather than manage around it.
- Understands the training group as a learning environment in its own right, able to work with what a cohort enacts, not only what it discusses, and to use that material in developing clinicians who can hold authority, difference, and obligation inside an organization.
- Treats the supervisory alliance as an intervention in its own right: an alliance that ruptures and repairs, with parallel process running through it and the supervisor's own reactions as usable information. Sustained engagement with the competency-based supervision literature will serve a candidate here.
- Monitors their own supervisory practice with the same reflective scrutiny they ask of the clinicians they hold. The self-of-the-supervisor is a practice they maintain, not a concept they have taught.
- Tolerates not-knowing without rushing to resolve it, and can hold a trainee in it. Can examine their own missteps and misattunements without defensiveness and without collapse.
- Brings genuine cultural humility into the supervisory field, not as a module but as an orientation, including the willingness to name and work with difference inside the supervisory pair.
Requirements
Required Qualifications
- Doctoral degree in psychology, marriage and family therapy, or a closely related field (PhD or PsyD). The doctorate is required because the role works on the conditions of clinical formation at a level that draws on doctoral-depth scientific training and on teaching competency, and because it asks for someone who has themselves come through the compressive formation of doctoral training and an accredited, competency-based doctoral internship.
- Independent clinical licensure in Minnesota, as a Licensed Psychologist or a doctoral-level LMFT at the independent practice level, or documented eligibility with a defined timeline.
- Board-approved supervisor status under the applicable Minnesota licensing board, or eligibility to obtain it. Fellows license across social work, marriage and family therapy, and professional clinical counseling, and this role is accountable for the supervision structure serving all three.
- Clinical supervision experience with pre-licensed clinicians of sufficient duration to have genuinely formed a supervisee, not merely 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: the coordination, tracking, and operational work that holds everything else in place.
Preferred Qualifications
- Substantial clinical experience in community-based, public, or outpatient settings serving diverse and underinsured populations. This is weighted heavily in this search; see "What We're Looking For" above.
- Training or sustained exposure to a reflective supervision model (the infant and early childhood mental health tradition), or to mentalization-based treatment and theory.
- Graduate faculty experience (core, affiliate, or adjunct) in a psychology, counseling, social work, or marriage and family therapy program. APA-accredited training program administration experience is a major plus.
- Experience designing and facilitating graduate-level clinical seminars, including sustained cohort facilitation across a semester or program arc.
- AAMFT Approved Supervisor status or active candidacy, pursued voluntarily beyond what licensure required.
- Board certification, or active pursuit of board certification, in Couple and Family Psychology (ABPP/CFP).
- Demonstrated engagement with the competency-based supervision literature.
- Familiarity with group relations theory, experiential group learning, or the Tavistock tradition.
- Evidence of field engagement beyond the local level: presentations, publications, professional association involvement.
- A history of, or genuine interest in, action research within organizations.
- Bilingual candidates are strongly encouraged; expanding access for underserved communities is central to the clinic's mission.
A Note on Fit
Lorenz is a small institution with a long horizon and outsized intellectual ambition. It does not have the infrastructure of an academic medical center or the name recognition of a flagship university program. What it has is a carefully designed formational environment, a clinical culture that takes psychotherapy seriously as a discipline, and a leadership team building on a generational timeline.
The right candidate has likely been doing this work somewhere that could not fully hold it: where the supervision hour was the first thing moved when the calendar tightened, where program quality lived downstream of priorities set elsewhere, and where watching a trainee formed poorly was a problem without a remedy. That experience is common, and it is not a personal failure. It is what happens when training is not an institution's primary task. Here it is.
Candidates who hold or have held graduate faculty appointments will find much of this role familiar and are encouraged to apply; teaching is treated as a competency here rather than an incidental duty. The right candidate is not primarily motivated by the title, but by the possibility of doing work they already care about inside an institution designed to support it.
For candidates weighing a move to the area: the southwest Twin Cities metro is an unusually fitting place to do this particular work. Minnesota has among the highest rates of civic engagement, voter turnout, and volunteerism in the country, which is not incidental to a clinic whose model treats clinical formation as an antechamber to civic life. The region also holds abundant green space and food and music scenes that are genuinely among the best in the nation.
Where This Leads
Five years into this role, the person holding it has a lineage. The supervisors working across the clinic's sites include clinicians they helped form as fellows and then watched become people who now form others. What a good supervisor once gave them is, by then, in the building in more than one pair of hands, and it will outlast any single tenure. That is finally what the role is for: not to run a program, but to build the makers a community-based clinic needs in order to keep forming clinicians well, long after any one person has gone.
What This Role Is Not
- This is not a remote position. The training model depends on people being in rooms together.
- This is not primarily a teaching role. The Associate Training Director teaches, and teaches well, but a candidate looking for a curriculum to deliver would find this disappointing.
- This is not free of administration. A two-year program carries real operational weight, even with the operational axis holding much of the machinery.
- This is not a way to stop practicing. The role includes a clinical caseload by design.
- This is not the right fit for a candidate whose deciding factors are schedule flexibility, remote work, or compensation. Those are legitimate priorities; they are not what this role is organized around.
Compensation and Structure
$125,000–$160,000 annually, depending on qualifications. W-2, salaried, exempt. Full benefits.
The range reflects experience and the scope a candidate is able to carry from the start. The role includes a clinical caseload.
Benefits include student loan repayment; medical, dental, and vision insurance; life insurance; short- and long-term disability; 401(k) with employer match; HSA; employee assistance program; paid parental leave; paid time off and holidays; Paid Burnout Time, a protected leave benefit separate from PTO; paid service and volunteer time; flexible scheduling; and a continuing education allowance, in addition to approximately 100 hours annually of board-approved CE that come with working in an active training clinic.
Primary in-person worksite is one of the clinic's southwest metro locations, approximately 15 to 30 miles from downtown Minneapolis and St. Paul.
Process and Application
Applications consist of a CV and cover letter, submitted at lorenzclinic.com/join-us. A cover letter is required; applications submitted without one are not reviewed.
The cover letter matters here. The clinic is not looking for a statement of interest in supervision and training; that is assumed. Nor is it looking for a description of theoretical orientation, which is among the least reliable things a clinician can report about themselves; the vocabulary of relational and systemic work is widely available and is not the same as the capacity underneath it.
The clinic is looking for evidence of how a candidate thinks when the work is hard: a case that went wrong and was stayed with; a supervisee whose development the candidate was part of, and what they actually did; a cohort or training group held through a difficult middle; or a supervision problem still unresolved. Please de-identify any client or supervisee and omit any detail that could identify them; what matters is how a candidate thought and what they did, not the specifics of the case. Three substantive paragraphs are worth more than three polished pages.
Finalists may be asked to provide writing samples and/or professional references from a clinical supervisor or training colleague.
Lorenz Clinic is an equal opportunity employer committed to building a diverse and inclusive clinical community. We are an Equal Employment Opportunity/Affirmative Action employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, age, national origin, protected veteran status, disability status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, marital status, genetic information, or any other characteristic protected by law.
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