Graduate training in industrial-organizational psychology: some oft-ignored contextual issues

Canadian Psychology, Feb-May 1998 by Kline, Theresa, Rowe, Patricia

The second issue for graduate training is to expose our students to what we are expected to do to enhance our own careers. Students who have a realistic job preview of an academic's life will make a better-informed career decision later. Academics are accountable to many stakeholders -- undergraduate students, graduate students, graduate programs, granting agencies, Departments, Faculties, the community, our professional societies and journal editors to name the more important Ones. We need to make sure that our students engage in as much teaching, research, publishing, grant-writing, consulting, and citizenship behaviour as possible in the short time that they are with us.

Technology is another of the buzzwords that seems to be prevalent around many universities (and all organizations) these days. This will have an impact on all workers, not just incoming university appointments or I-O Psychology graduates. However, this does not mean we should not speak about it. Specifically, technology is being touted as the saviour of the "access to students" problem that universities are trying to solve. How do you keep doing more and more with less and less? How can we use the Internet, World Wide Web, Video conferencing systems, e-mail systems, electronic whiteboards, etc. to teach more students. If the past is any indicator of the future, Psychology will always be a popular major as well as elective. Because most of us are involved in teaching undergraduates, it is important to at least be informed about what technology can do and what it cannot do.

The fact that most of these technologies are extremely expensive and the interactive capabilities of the software systems are in the infancy stages of development are issues that most of us know very little about. We should be actively engaging our students in projects and work that will enable them to be familiar with high technology solutions to curriculum meeting problems. In addition to being a "problem solver" for student access, facilitation with computers, computer languages, hardware and software are all becoming more and more necessary in our laboratories. We would like to encourage programs to provide an emphasis on the importance of the interface between technology and the worker. The article by Methot (this issue) brings this important issue to the foreground, and highlights the importance of this issue no matter where our graduates will be working in the future.

Multi-disciplinary is a term that strikes fear into the heart of researchers (specifically new ones) who are supposed to generate an "independent program of research" to obtain tenure. Trying to get groups of people to work together on research projects is a difficult task. It is most likely to succeed if it happens in a "bottom-up" fashion (i.e., colleagues talk about research ideas over coffee and find out they have a common passion). However, we are seeing the imposition of a "top-down" strategy by the granting agencies most particularly. More than ever before, monies are being offered on collaborative, multi-disciplinary, cross-university teams or researchers. As a result, people are trying to find like-minded colleagues who then are supposed to design a project that would satisfy their disparate interests and make it into a coherent research proposal. Perhaps at this point these projects and programs should be subjected to an evaluation of their costs and benefits.