Max. Classroom Capacity: A Word from the E&T Practitioner Subcommittee

Dear readers,

One of the great benefits of writing this column is that I get to have interesting conversations about teaching with all kinds of folks who are engaged in the work of supporting teachers of I-O psychology. Members of SIOP’s Teaching Committee, and its many subcommittees, certainly fall into that category. SIOP’s Teaching Committee “…generates ideas and produces and curates content relevant to SIOP members who engage in teaching, education, or I-O psychology program administration at various universities.” Periodically I invite members of this committee to highlight their work in this column.

Dr. Sophie Kay is a member of the Education & Training Practitioner Subcommittee. This subcommittee is working on building resources to help I-O instructors develop the applied skills of their students. I am delighted to welcome Dr. Kay to Max. Classroom Capacity to share the important work of this committee

Should’ve Learned That in Grad School: A Practitioner Competency Resource for I-O Educators

Sophie A. Kay

People Research Scientist, Meta

On behalf of the 2025-2026 SIOP Education & Training Practitioner Subcommittee: Sophie Kay (Lead), Rob Stilson, Zack Stubblefield, Morgan Taylor, Seth Osborn, Nohelia Paz, Susan Johnson, and Nathaniel Lawlor.

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Sophie A. Kay, PhD. Email: drsophiekay@gmail.com

Seventy-seven percent of I-O psychology PhDs end up in nonacademic roles (Lin et al., 2019). That number climbs higher once you factor in master’s and undergraduate students. Despite these realities, I-O graduate programs continue to emphasize research training far more than applied competencies (Byrne et al., 2014; Tett et al., 2013; Weathington et al., 2014).

This is not a new observation. The science–practice divide has been discussed extensively in our field, but most of that conversation has focused on communication via academic papers (e.g., Aguinis & Cascio, 2008; Rynes, 2012). Far less attention has been paid to pedagogy—to how we actually train the next generation of I-O psychologists for the work most of them will do. In a 2024 TIP article, my coauthor and I documented this disconnect from the student perspective: many I-O students perceive a major gap between their day-to-day activities as graduate students and the actual implementation of theories into practice (Kay & Sijan, 2024). In a survey of I-O doctoral and master’s programs, Tett et al. (2013) found that courses on consulting or business skills were offered on average only 1.5 times over a five-year period. More recently, Zhou et al. (2024) argued that skills like public speaking, project management, and social media are critical for I-O careers but are either entirely absent or underemphasized in most programs. Although you can learn these skills on the job, lack of these skills can prevent students from being competitive on the job market.

Here is an uncomfortable truth worth naming: Many I-O programs are led by faculty whose primary expertise is research, not practice. Most professors were trained as scientists—and trained well. But competencies like consulting, stakeholder influence, project management, dashboard creation, and people analytics coding are not things most faculty were taught themselves, let alone taught how to teach. This is not a personal failing. It is a structural feature of how our field trains academics. But it means there is a gap between what faculty feel prepared to teach and what students need to learn—and that gap has real consequences for graduates entering applied roles. That is why the SIOP Education & Training Practitioner Subcommittee spent the 2025-2026 year building a resource designed to close it.

What We Built

The I-O Practitioner Competencies document is an open, living resource that identifies 13 competencies we believe applied I-O psychologists should have. These competencies were selected through a subcommittee consensus process. These include analytics & coding, consulting, influence, project management, ai, presenting, data storytelling, writing, networking, teamwork, critical thinking, and interpretation. For each competency, the document provides: a definition, a rationale for why it matters, must-have skills at the undergraduate level, must-have and nice-to-have skills at the graduate level, common pain points, and concrete examples of what the competency looks like in practice.

This resource supplements SIOP’s Education & Training Guidelines, focusing on the specific KSAOs that I-O practitioners have reported finding useful or wished they had learned in graduate school. Two features are worth highlighting:

First, the self-assessment. Before diving into any individual competency, we encourage faculty to start with a brief self-assessment designed to help you figure out where you stand on each competency and where to focus. This is not an evaluation—it is a starting point. If you teach I-O courses and have wondered which practitioner skills you could realistically integrate into your curriculum, the self-assessment is a 10-minute way to find out.

Second, the rubric for the presenting competency. We have included a sample rubric that can be integrated directly into a course syllabus. We designed this to support a professor teaching undergraduates to integrate presenting into their classroom. Although a professor may never have personally presented to executive leadership, they still assess students on corporate presenting skills, because the rubric helps operationalize what “good” looks like. For example, practitioners generally should start a presentation with the key message, whereas in academia, the key message tends to come at the end of a presentation, after posing the research question, explaining the methods, etc. A similar rubric could be developed for writing, highlighting the need for an executive summary. Whether more rubrics like this would be useful, or whether faculty need something else entirely to adopt these competencies, is exactly the kind of feedback we are hoping to hear.

We don’t expect anyone to incorporate all of these competencies into a single course. We do believe that they provide a holistic list to help professors think through how they might integrate more practitioner skills into their curriculum. In an ideal world, programs would consider which courses best fit which competencies to make sure that they are all covered and sequenced to progress based on degree of complexity (e.g., start by requiring a RACI chart for project management in a first-year course and progress to using agile project management in more advanced courses). We would be surprised if there are programs at this stage, but if you would like to discuss how to sequence these competencies thoughtfully, please reach out!

What We Need From You

 This resource is in its first version, and it is only as good as the community that shapes it. We are asking I-O faculty, program directors, and anyone involved in educating I-O psychologists to do the following:

1. Take the self-assessment. It takes approximately 10 minutes and will help you identify which competencies are most relevant to your teaching.
2. Pick one competency and read through it. Just one. See if the structure—definition, skill levels, rubric, examples—gives you what you would need to integrate it into a course.
3. Tell us what is missing. Use the comment function or suggesting mode in the document. Does the competency definition resonate? Are the skill levels realistic? What resources would you need to actually teach this? What additional competencies should we consider?
4. Share the resource with a colleague. If you know someone who teaches I-O courses, send them the link. The more perspectives we hear from, the better this resource becomes.
5. Join the conversation. Contact Sophie Kay (drsophiekay@gmail.com) to attend a subcommittee meeting or have a one-on-one conversation about the resource.

The document is available here: I-O Practitioner Competencies

We have spent decades writing about the science–practice divide. This resource is an attempt to do something about it—not through more journal articles but through education. We believe that closing this gap starts in the classroom, and we believe that I-O faculty are the people best positioned to do it. But we cannot build this alone. We need your expertise, your feedback, and your willingness to try something new. The I-O students entering the workforce next year are counting on it.

References

Aguinis, H., & Cascio, W. F. (2008). Narrowing the science-practice divide: A call to action. The Industrial-Organizational Psychologist, 46(2), 27–34.

Byrne, Z. S., Hayes, T. L., Mort McPhail, S., Hakel, M. D., Cortina, J. M., & McHenry, J. J. (2014). Educating industrial-organizational psychologists for science and practice: Where do we go from here? Industrial and Organizational Psychology, 7(1), 2–14. https://doi.org/10.1111/iops.12095

Kay, S. A., & Cronin, M. A. (2025). Should’ve learned that in grad school: Gaps & solutions in the I-O practitioner curricula [Alternative session]. Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology Annual Conference, Denver, CO, United States.

Kay, S. A., & Sijan, M. A. I. (2024). The disconnect between science and practice: Concerns of graduate students. The Industrial-Organizational Psychologist, 61(3). https://www.siop.org/Research-Publications/Items-of-Interest/ArtMID/19366/ArticleID/8100/preview/true/The-Disconnect-Between-Science-and-Practice-Concerns-of-Graduate-Students

Lin, L., Christidis, P., Stamm, K., & Conroy, J. (2019, December). The academic psychology workforce: Characteristics of psychology research doctorates in faculty positions (1995-2015). American Psychological Association: Center for Workforce Studies. https://www.apa.org/workforce/publications/academic-psychology

Rynes, S. L. (2012). The research-practice gap in industrial-organizational psychology and related fields: Challenges and potential solutions. In S. W. J. Kozlowski (Ed.), Oxford handbook of industrial and organizational psychology (Vol. 1, pp. 409–452). Oxford University Press.

Tett, R. P., Walser, B., Brown, C., Simonet, D. V., & Tonidandel, S. (2013). 2011 SIOP graduate program benchmarking survey part 3: Curriculum and competencies. The Industrial-Organizational Psychologist, 50(4), 69–90. https://www.siop.org/Portals/84/TIP/Archives/504.pdf

Weathington, B. L., Bergman, S. M., & Bergman, J. Z. (2014). Training science-practitioners: Broadening the training of industrial-organizational psychologists. Industrial and Organizational Psychology, 7(1), 35–38. https://doi.org/10.1111/iops.12101

Zhou, S., Belwalkar, B. B., & Kath, L. (2024). From grad school to the real world: Three perspectives on essential skills. The Industrial-Organizational Psychologist, 61(3). https://www.siop.org/Research-Publications/Items-of-Interest/ArtMID/19366/ArticleID/8091/preview/true/From-Grad-School-to-the-Real-World-Three-Perspectives-on-Essential-Skills