What the devil is Occupational Psychology?!

Before you think i'm crazy, let me explain this photograph. This was taken at London Zoo. The tortoise 'attempting' to hump the other tortoise spent approximately 10 minutes slowly plodding from one end of its enclosure to the other to then spend another 5 minutes trying to mount this rather displeased 'drowning'  tortoise.    

I think this gives some explanation of the struggles I and my fellow Occupational Psychologists have in trying to explain not only what the profession is to people who have never heard of it (understandable) but also to people within Human Resources, the people we are supposed to have most in common with and the field in which we are supposed to be able to get work!

Ok, so I'm not into 'humping' my fellow colleagues, but I do seem to spend a lot of time 'attempting' to explain to recruitment agencies, when looking for work and people in the work place, when trying to add something of value to the work environment, just what it is I do!

So, what is it?

Well, the British Psychological Society state that 'Psychology is the scientific study of people, the mind and behaviour.'

Occupational psychology is basically the above, but in a work setting. Sound vague? Yep, that's what I thought too.

Well, it covers the areas below - something I only found out when I started looking for 'occupational psychologist jobs' - something which doesn't really exist and something which would be useful to know before you start a masters degree in the subject hoping for a job at the end of it... (FYI....)

So, these are the basic blocks that make up what occ psycs do:

Human-machine interaction
Design of work environments
Personnel selection and assessment
Performance appraisal and career development
Counselling and personal development
Training
Employee relations and motivation
Organisational development and change

You might think that a lot of those sound like HR... they are! Much of what occ psycs do is aligned to what HR professionals do - training of employees; designing training; design of work environments - things like how your desk is set up, or in factory spaces how the machinery is set up to ensure safe and efficient working, also known as ergonomics; recruitment of staff; looking at employee relations - employment law, pay / sickness / reward - all that good stuff; performance appraisals, design and development of them but also giving them; career development - usually part of performance appraisals and usually a thing people write as objectives at the beginning of the year and never look at again! 

So, being as the field is so closely aligned to HR, you would likely think it'd be easy to get a job within HR having got the necessary skills - sadly you'd be wrong. The difference between an occ psyc skills set and an HR skills set is that occ psycs have a deeper understanding of the people side of HR. HR professionals, from what I can gather, have a deeper understanding of the transactional sides of HR. Correct me if I’m wrong here HR folk!

However, these days the two are merging and the HR field is becoming more and more about aliging people to business - ie. really understanding what people can offer to help the business grow and using HR practices and policies to do this. So, HR and Occ Psyc should be working together, right?  Well, this is very much work in progress, so far it seems that the two are not well aligned.

That leaves a few other non HR areas:

Human - machine interaction - this looks at how people and computers interact. Things like user interfaces and website design. From a psychological perspective, occ psycs have an understanding of how the brain works, how humans perceive things, how they remember things, what appeals and doesn't appeal when it comes to colours and design etc. So occ pysc can help with design through their knowledge of human behaviour.

Counselling and personal development - this is things like careers counselling and coaching, mentoring and offering confidential counselling services in the workplace. This is probably the more traditional view of the kind of things psychologists do.

Lastly, organisational development and change. This is about managing how people adapt to change at work. Workplaces are changing all of the time, new systems, new processes, moving offices, new company objectives forcing changes in how people work with each other - cultural changes and the like. This is a very popular area and is an area many occupational psychologists can get work.

So, I hope that gives snap shot of what we cover. It's pretty varied but fundamentally it boils down to understanding people and what makes them work more effectively. I hope you'll agree that the things we do and the insight we can add is valuable to people and organisations and I hope this can help to spread the word that business needs psychology!! ;)

Want a job? You're in for a fight!

Hi all, (i'm hoping one day I will actually be talking to some people, currently I am followerless...! I plan to try and jazz this one up a bit in the hope that people will get a little more engaged.. use some of these psyc tools I talk about! )

So, it's been a fair few months since my last post, I think they call it writers block... or just plain lack of inspiration! But, i'm starting to get my creative streak back and i'm keen to write again.

So recently I was subjected to the world of job hunting and my experiences got me thinking about what has changed in the job market and how people source jobs over the last 10 years or so (since I made a real start to my working life).

I had a flashback the other day to my first ever job... I was a waitress, 1 day a week, serving the Sunday lunch trade in a local 3 star hotel. Classy joint it was... I worked 5 hours a day for the sum total of £12.50 which was then my partying money for the week. I was 15. I got the job through a friend, handed my CV to them, which consisted of a couple of potential GCSE grades, my running club membership and not a whole lot else. Getting a job was easy.

My next couple of roles were in a bottom of the run jewellry shop in the Metro Centre, where we had to hang on to the fat gold chains while we presented them to the eager clientele and tried to avoid letting go so they didn't leg it with the merchandise!

Next I worked in an equally upmarket paper shop where I had the delights of the Sunday morning shift. You'd think Sunday morning, people wandering out to get their morning papers and a pint of milk; not so much when you work from 8am and the store is right next door to Gatecrasher, a then popular haunt for the trance music lovers of the late 90's, who would come and get their supply of fags and chewing gum to avoid chewing their own cheeks off!

After this I had a spate of part time jobs in the hospitality industry, before making my move to the 'Big City', the land of opportunity, or so they say... that was 2003.

So I made the move into 'proper work', you know, 9-5.30, office job type. Earned my first real wage at 23k a year. I thought it was alot then, actually I still do given the situation i'm in now, almost 10 years later.

My first real job was at a spread betting firm in the Big Smoke - what's spread betting? I didn't know either, I'm still not that sure! Despite my lack of knowledge, it was again easy to get the job. I turned up, had a chat with a guy in the accountancy department, who incedently spoke very little English, 20 minutes later I had a job. Simples.

From there I moved from accountancy to personal assistant work, craving something with more people interaction. I bluffed my way through interviews pretending I had expereince I didn't have but knowing I could do the job standing on my head. I was right. I spent the next 4 years as a PA / receptionist and most of the time I quite enjoyed it. I met some great people along the way and looking back, if I'd stayed put I would have had a great career as a high flying executive assistant by now.

I got itchy feet. During my work as a PA I decided I wanted to study psychology. I'd already spent my early 20's studying and I now I was about to sign over the rest of them. To cut a long story short, I ended up with an MSc in Occupational Psychology. Sounds fancy eh!

I loved my time studying, it's such an interesting area - I intend to write another post on exactly what Occupational Psychology is so I won't go into that here - and I believed it would open up a world of opportunity!

So, 2008, the recession hit. At that point I was in a job and off the back of my dissertation I was offered another - what I thought was an even better job! I was set. Unfortunately, it was a short term contract so I spent half of the time in the job looking for another one. Finding that job was one of the most difficult times of my life.

With a list of qualifications as long as my arm and 6 years work experience, I went through interview after interview, being told that my interview technique was great but every time, there is someone who more closely matches the skills required. That's what happens in a recession, there are 100+ people competing for every job. Your wants and desires for the perfect career go out of the window and you'll take anything. Making the tea if you have to. My career plans as I see them are on hold at the moment, I know where I want to go but at present I can't get there.

Luckily I have a decent job that pays well and at the moment things are ticking over. It's not what I envisgaed but its a great company and perhaps it will offer opportunities I can't see at the moment. Time will tell.

The moral? Never give up on your dreams, however long it takes. The job market is tough right now but don't get disheartened, we work for many years and things will pick up again. In the mean time, there's more to life than work!