Industrial Organisational Psychology - The Psychology job that isn't therapy

We're going to be talking this morning about psychology, um, but in particular, the area of psychology that you work in, which is in industrial psychology.

Yeah, correct.

There's probably a few people that listen to the podcast that won't understand what IO psychology is.

Tell us a little bit about that and how your career began.

Yeah, sure.

So I guess to start from the start in terms of what industrial organizational psychology is, it goes by a few different names depending on kind of where you are around the world.

In Australia, it's often referred to as organizational psychology.

Might get called occupational psychology in the UK.

But ultimately, it is psychology applied to the workplace, so while I am a psychologist, I'm not like a therapist in the kind of classical sense of what you would think of as a psychologist.

So in the most broad terms possible, IO psychology is basically taking psychology principles and learnings and applying those to the workplace.

So for me specifically, that looks like working in hiring and recruitment, but it might also look like working in leadership, working in with teams, all the sorts of various ways that psychology can apply in an organization from the individual-

Right

... all the way up to the kind of organizational level.

So that's, uh, that's the kind of 30-second summary of what IO psychology is.