Industrial / Organizational Psychology video transcript

Industrial organisational psychology is a fascinating blend of both business and psychology. It allows the consultant the opportunity to design interventions in organisations to help with performance, selection, diversity and just a number of things that deal with organisational effectiveness.

Businesses are always looking for people, consultants with skills that are capable of coming into the organisation and really designing effective interventions. I can tell you about an experience I had where an organisation was pretty much rudderless, I mean just no direction at all and I actually went in and designed a strategic planning process for them that allowed them to come up with five key areas where they had strategic goals by the time I left. They also had a way of measuring their effectiveness in terms of achieving those goals.

It’s very difficult to only come from the perspective of a lecturer where you talk about what the student has read in the textbook and try to be effective in that manner. You have to have a number of years of experience in order to make the classroom come alive and that’s what the practitioner model enables you to do, to draw on those experiences that you’ve had, in my case as a consultant for a number of years, to be able to talk about how those models and how those theories apply in the real world.

There is such a need for IO psychologists and a need for people with training and development and skills capable of going into organisations and working to help improve performance and to make organisations highly effective.

The contacts and the relationships that we’ve begun establishing in the Los Angeles area have been so important. We’ll have an opportunity with at least four organisations for our students to have meaningful internships with this Summer and I think that this is only going to grow over time and I think our IO programme is going to quickly become the premier programme for businesses within the Southern California area once they understand what our students are capable of doing and that the consulting relationships that we can forge with them are going to be lasting ones.

Industrial / Organizational Psychology video

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