With many colleges and universities moving their face-to-face classes online in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, many of us are in the predicament of having to quickly transition our courses to an online format. In response to this need, SIOP’s Education and Training Committee is spearheading a cross-committee effort to share tips and recommendations to help our colleagues quickly transition their courses online. In the coming days, we will also share dates and times for a series of “virtual office hours” hosted by SIOP members experienced in delivering online I-O graduate and undergraduate courses, in order to provide additional support and advice.

Through initial efforts, we’ve produced an Online Teaching Survival Guide. This document consolidates resources and recommendations that will help with the rapid transition of classes to online formats that will keep the structural integrity of courses they have already designed.  This is not the time to “reinvent the wheel” when it comes to your courses, but you may have to redirect where your wheel is going.

National Science Foundation
Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences (SBE)
Meeting with SBE Scientific Societies

Wed, April 22, 2020; 10:00AM-12:00PM EST (US and Canada)
This meeting will be virtual.

The new issue of Consulting Psychology Journal is a Special Issue on The Strategic Design and Management of Psychologically Based Consulting Firms. 

Guest-edited by Marc B. Sokol and Larry Norton, the articles offer an inside look at a variety of models for initiating, growing, divesting and closing a consulting business in consulting psychology (See bottom for links to the articles). 

The issue kicks off with a wonderful introduction to this special issue by Marc and Larry providing a focus for the five individual consulting company and practitioner based practice model authors to share their wisdom, experiences and recommendations for starting and growing a successful business in consulting psychology.

Dr. Frederick L. Oswald, longstanding member and former president of SIOP (2017-18), has been named chair of the Board on Human-Systems Integration (BOHSI) of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. He assumed his duties on Jan. 1, 2020. BOHSI deals with a wide range of issues relevant to I-O psychology. Current projects address making recommendations on facility staffing requirements of the Veterans Health Administration, working with the U.S. Air Force on human capital management, and reviewing ways to improve patient care by reducing clinician burnout.

“It is a real privilege to have worked with my BOHSI colleagues on a range of important and interesting issues, and now to be the chair is quite the honor and responsibility,” Oswald said. “Human factors psychology and expertise features strongly within BOHSI—but organizational psychology is also critical to every issue on the table, and I hope SIOP will be interested in increasing its involvement.”

Oswald is a professor and Herbert S. Autrey Chair of Social Sciences in the Department of Psychological Sciences at Rice University in Houston, Texas. His research and publications focus on developing, implementing, and statistically evaluating psychological measures in personnel selection and college admissions contexts.

“My years of fortunate involvement in SIOP has allowed me to work with and listen to a wide range of I-O psychologists. This helps me communicate the many ways that SIOP might importantly inform the National Academies,” he said. “Although own research deals with personnel selection and testing, there are so many other areas of IO psychology that are relevant to BOHSI, such as training, teams, recruitment, diversity, and management and culture. In general, it is my role as BOHSI chair to bring the best objective science available to inform a variety of complex issues facing the world and workforce. I-O psychology, human factors, and other scientific disciplines are usefully brought to bear on these issues, and therefore I hope SIOP will become a strong supporter of BOHSI.”

We are thrilled to announce SIOP’s new Disability Inclusion and Accessibility Committee (DIAC). This ad-hoc committee seeks to help SIOP become a barrier-free Society by raising awareness of issues of disability and disability identity in the workforce and helping improve the experiences of all SIOP members, I-O students, and other people with disabilities in the workforce through science and practice.  Given its mandate, the committee is composed of scientists and practitioners, US and international members, people with a lived experience of a disability and allies, and people at different career stages.