Industrial/ Organizational Psychology

[Haggler]

Hello-

I keep hearing about the good pay and opportunities in industrial and organizational psychology. However, none of these places explains what I/O psych is. What is this field and what do these psychologists do? Does anyone have any info or opinions on this field?

Thanks

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[Haggler]

Additionally, I meant to ask, do I/O psychologists need a PhD or a PsyD?? Or, which degree is preferred in this field?

 

[Therapist4Chnge]

I've posted a bit on this in the past, so a search may yield some good posts by myself and others.

I/O can be an MS or Ph.D. (I haven't seen any Psy.D. programs in this area, as I/O tends to be VERY stats heavy and has nothing to do with clinical/therapy work)

-t

 

[Ollie123]

I/O is definitely a PhD (or an MS), never heard of an I/O PsyD. Its actually pretty incompatible with the PsyD since training would not even in the ballpark of "practitioner". As t4c said it usually involves very rigorous stats and methods courses, probably more than any other area of psychology save for the few "quantitative psychology" programs out there. There is consulting and leadership training, but that's vastly different from, say, teaching people to do SCIDs and provide therapy for depression.

Don't have time right now to go into too much detail, but if you google it you can probably get some good descriptions. The gist of it is consulting work on certain human resources-like issues (leadership, job satisfaction, employee selection, training, etc.). Or, in many cases, you'll be hired by one company as essentially an "internal" researcher, or in HR positions and such.

Hope that helps!