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What were really talking about here is learning the same kind of learning that people engage in every day.  The kinds of things were going to discuss in this lesson relate, in many cases directly, to the kinds of things that get discussed in most introductory psychology courses in chapters on learning and cognition.  When we put it into an I-O context, we end up talking about it in terms of training.

In the year 2000, United States-based organizations spent $54 BILLION dollars on educating and training their employees.  The key idea of training is to change the way people behave on the job in some fashion.  Its not just learning, its also behavior change.  After the training is done, trainees should DO something differently than they did before.

I-O psychologists are involved in every stage, potentially, of training programs.  We assess the pretraining environment, we conduct needs assessments, we design training, we evaluate the training program, and, if the organization wants us to, we can administer it.  Alternately, they can have one of their own employees actually deliver the training after its designed.