Difficulties of people accepting the value of occupational psychology as a profession.

Industrial Psychology is such an important profession as its aim is to help people to perform efficiently and effectively and therefore its principals feed into the other professions and help them to operate more efficiently. We are unique in the way we approach our work as well, we work with the goals of the company as a whole, increase productivity, workplace performance e.t.c but also on the morale of the individual employee, a bottom up approach rather than the usual top down approach.

Unfortunately I think there are many issues with industrial / occupational psychology as a profession. Firstly, people who do not study psychology or have an interest in the human psyche, don't have a real understanding of the value such practice can add to organisational environments and worker output. Most problems in the workplace stem from human interaction, be it interaction with each other or those external to the business, or, in the modern world, human interaction with machinery. In other professions, for example HR, IT, Marketing, the outputs are more tangible, e.g. a new marketing campaign resulting in increased sales, or a new website which sees more traffic than the old version. Applying psychology in the workplace is much more complex and doesn't provide fast results.

In my view, work psychology as a discipline and work psychologists as professionals need to concentrate on two things; the first is ensuring that anyone practising in the profession, whatever their title or whichever discipline they are working in, should concentrate on marketing the value of psychology in the workplace. This should primarily be done through applying a ‘quick win’ strategy so that fast and effective changes can be put in place which show the real value psychologists can add. This strategy would also serve to get people excited about what psychology can offer organisations.

Secondly, there needs to be more buzz around what psychology has to offer. Even with a great MSc course in occupational psychology, and supposedly the most practical in terms of transfer into the workplace, I was not prepared for the lack of enthusiasm and understanding of the value that the profession can offer. Nor was I prepared for how little (despite having 6 years of work experience) I knew about how to apply the principles. Don't get me wrong, there is good work out there, there are consultants I work with who are delivering top quality people and organisational development solutions on an on-going basis, but the industry is still in its early stages and our new grads in the profession are not prepared to fight the battle.