Last month a few I-O graduate students from the University of Guelph went to a local escape room. For those unfamiliar with these locations, groups pay to be locked in a room and must solve a series of riddles, clues, and tasks, usually based around a story or theme, in order to free themselves. Groups are challenged to achieve a series of difficult tasks in set timelines, engage in innovative and critical thinking about conventional items, and in turn establish informal group dynamics (for an entertaining demonstration of this type of activity please have a look at this clip from the Ellen DeGeneres show). As our group struggled through the series of required tasks, one of the authors of this column turned to another author and said, “How many I-O psychology students does it take to get out of a locked room?”

Ever wonder what is happening within I-O psychology in Latin America? In this issue of the International Practice Forum, we got together with Iúri, Laura, and Caio to discuss organizational and work psychology in Brazil. Read on for a brief snapshot of the country, recent initiatives, and ongoing projects and research!

So far in this column, we’ve talked about the definition of training as understood by most companies’ L&D departments and what the structure of training functions typically looks like in organizations. In this column, we’re going to describe the wide variety of job roles that commonly fall underneath the category of L&D and what educational backgrounds the kind of individuals in such roles tend to possess—in other words, who are these people?

The scientific study of people is complicated. Although human behavior is astoundingly predictable, scientific disciplines are often classified into a “hard” and “soft” dichotomy based on perceptions of the field’s methodological rigor and exactitude. Unfortunately, this artificial categorization rarely takes the complexity of what we study into account. Individuals vary greatly on a number of factors, and those differences influence their behaviors. However, there are also countless environmental factors that influence human behavior, and any number of these factors can interact and modify the behaviors we might otherwise expect. These individual differences and their interactions with the social environment are what makes the study of people so interesting but also extremely difficult. This complexity affects our ability to accurately and reliably measure unobservable constructs and influences the extent to which we are able to unobtrusively conduct research in naturalistic (work) settings.

I recently had the opportunity to talk to Ann Marie Ryan and Abdifatah Ali about the small grant award that they won from SIOP in the Spring of 2016. Although Jessica Keeney was unable to join the conversation, she did provide additional insights via email. Let’s take a closer look at the research that they are doing and how it will help not only organizations make better hiring decisions but also help a increase the fairness of hiring decisions for a group that is commonly overlooked because of their past.