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!! ;)