Roles and Responsibilities of an Occupational Psychologist

As an occupational psychologist trainee, you will be taught how to attain job satisfaction in your field of work and help employees perform efficiently. As a beginner in the field of occupational psychologists, you will come across a lot of things that are unfamiliar to you. Gradually, you will be able to cope with them well and get acquainted with the tasks as day passes by. 

This type of job involves dealing with organisational issues that cannot be avoided. Remember, you will be working with individuals as well as teams like human resource and training experts, trade union representatives and staff in different departments. Either you can work as a staff or as a member of an occupational psychology consultancy. 

Occupational psychology companies help organisations with counselling and personal development, work and environment design, performance appraisal and career development, psychometric training, assessment and recruitment, motivation and employee relations, development and change.

As an occupational psychologist and Psychometrics trainee, you have to give your best and gain more experience in the field. Training is very important for your career as this gives you an edge over others. Handling different situations will  enable you to gain experience and efficiency in your field. You will have to utilise this experience to handle different situations which you can easily do if your training is good.

Importance of Recruitment Assesment Centres

Many organisations have assessment centres for recruitment purposes where a variety of solutions are designed to evaluate candidates against the required skills for a job role. The reason is to find a suitable candidate for a job role by including verbal and written exercises and selection tests.

Recruitment and coaching training of employees are an expensive process and selecting a candidate only on the basis of an interview can be a bit risky. The interview sessions are subject to personal biases or preferences. Psychometric assessments have therefore become significantly common at all levels, with the aim to make recruitment decisions more objective and fair. An individual's answer is compared to those given by a relevant group of individuals (a 'norm group'). Although we often think of psychometric assessments along with other tools enable companies to find the best candidate for a job role. Moreover, from a practical viewpoint, companies use these evaluations as they find them as economical and reliable.

Psychometrics training are often utilised by employers as one of their selection procedures. There are two types of tests, which are mainly used in a recruitment process. They are:

Cognitive tests - ability and aptitude tests which measure present ability and potential to learn;

Personality questionnaires - which measure behavioural characteristics.

Employers may use these assessments at various levels in their selection process. Some use them in the early phases of the recruitment to select candidates on the basis of score in the test who only will be called for interviews. Others use them in the later or final stages of their selection process. They are probably to be used as part of an Assessment Centre process.