Department of Management
Date of this Version
2013
Citation
Published in Industrial and Organizational Psychology: Perspectives on Science and Practice 6:1 (March 2013), pp. 20-24; doi: 10.1111/iops.12003
Abstract
What can we do to increase the employability of I–O psychology students? How do we move from providing information to developing real skills and characteristics that make our own students more employable? We cannot act as scolds for our academic institutions and society at large when we ourselves are not using our own knowledge to improve our processes. Consequently, we would like to make the argument that the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology itself become involved in designing a means by which the effectiveness of training can be compared across institutions and ensure that minimum standards are being met.
Added rigor in our training can only help us as a field. If we are to take the challenge of developing employability seriously, we need to begin in our classrooms and in the organizations we work in.
Hogan, Chamorro-Premuzic, and Kaiser have provided a useful model for understanding employability. We expanded on the vital point that both the character and the KSA elements of their employability model can be developed and that they are developed through work experiences. However, we have generally not been intentional about this development process. Plus we have really only focused our efforts on those for whom employability isn’t a problem. We believe that progress on the employability problem requires the acknowledgement that personality traits can and do change and the alignment of solutions in line with fostering these changes toward employability in business, societies, and in our own field.
Comments
Copyright © 2013 Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology. Published by John Wiley & Sons/Blackwell. Used by permission.