Grad School: Should I Get a Ph.D. or Master’s in I/O Psychology?

The graduate GPA will hurt you pretty badly. An axiom in I/O psych is “the best predictor of future performance is past performance,” so that will translate into poor predicted PhD performance for you. The two papers do make your case a little unusual though, so it’s hard to predict. I’d say if you have a really good reason for why your GPA is low and explain that well in admissions essays, you might still have a reasonable shot at decent PhD programs. So I’d recommend applying. But your chances may not be good (unless those are both top-tier pubs with you as first author). I’d recommend you apply to a school that shares your interests – I wrote an article on this topic: https://neoacademic.com/2011/08/03/grad-school-where-should-i-apply/

First of all, there’s no ambiguous “admissions” group in small high-quality programs – the ones that make the decisions are the current I/O faculty at those institutions. Remember, you’re not applying to the school – you’re applying for a 5+ year mentoring relationship with a specific person or group of people.

The lack of research experience in psychology will definitely be a negative for your application, unless you have published a few things in your current field, but it sounds like you haven’t. Most PhD programs at the highest tiers of institution don’t consider previous Master’s work unless it is VERY similar to what they want you to have completed at the Master’s level, so my suspicion is that completing a distinct I/O Master’s is probably a waste of time if you’re definitely on the PhD track. However, I think your situation is sufficiently unique that you should probably contact the faculty you’re thinking of working with at those institutions and ask their opinion.

I’m also not sure what you mean by “ranked highly”. If you’re interested in top 10, for comparison, I went to a top-10 program , coming out of undergrad with a 3.9 GPA, 99th percentile GRE scores, and an in press publication. I was still in the middle of the pack of those admitted. You might want to set your sights slightly lower, where your high GRE scores are more likely to lead faculty to overlook the lack of psych research experience (but this will vary from professor to professor). I would personally be very apprehensive unless you had an extremely convincing personal statement that explained the switch very clearly.

That is a very tricky question. One set of the primary advantages to an applied graduate program are the connections you gain by being a part of one. You just don’t generally get those in online I/O programs – at least right now. That may not be true for SNHU (I didn’t even know they had an I/O program), but I don’t know for sure.

Your question also isn’t really the right one to ask – that being in the service would mitigate the negative impression. Even students in low quality brick-and-mortar I/O master’s programs have a hard time finding jobs – the issue there is that the training often isn’t as high quality, or as focused, or as intense. For comparison, our master’s degree training requires a full-time commitment. Many of our students at the master’s level spend 60-80 hours per week going to class, working on research, etc. More during crunch time. We also only have 5-10 students at the master’s level (PhD track or otherwise) at any given time. You just don’t get that kind of intensive training and one-on-one attention in any online program that I know of (the same is true in diploma-mill master’s programs, of which there is a growing number). As a result, you come out with poorer harder-to-employ training.

I will add that Colorado State may be the lone exception to all of this. They have top-notch faculty (e.g. Kurt Kraiger, Jan Cleveland), so I would expect the training and alumni network to be top-notch too. But I don’t know anyone personally that has completed that program, so that’s a bit of a guess.

As for your military experience, it is very transportable to I/O, but I think the value placed on it varies a lot by employer. While I’ve personally seen the discipline, level-headedness, and problem solving that veterans often bring with them to I/O, not all see that value. More of concern to me in your response, however, is that you are comparing team leadership with what you might be doing with an I/O master’s. I don’t think that is typically what I/O training would prepare you for – that sounds more like an MBA. I/O is going to have you doing things like creating surveys to assess employee engagement, meeting with HR to discuss current retention strategies, etc. – not quite the same.

It would be very challenging to move into a PhD program, if that’s your goal. But if you wanted to try anyway, I’d recommend volunteering 10-20 hours per week at a local I/O psychology lab to get some recent research experience. With a year or two doing that, plus good GRE scores (start prepping now), you probably have a good chance. If you’re interested in a MS/MA, I’d recommend just applying – your extensive applied experience will be seen very positively, as long as your GREs are also strong.

Informal statistical training probably won’t help you – you would need to take a course somewhere.

To determine the specialization, you should look at the list of faculty for each institution you are interested in and read up on their recent publications and stated interests. If they are interested in training, they’ll say it there. And I would not trust a program that does not list its faculty online.

As to your thinking with the Master’s, it sounds like you might be thinking about a PhD after the Master’s. I will say that it generally a bit easier to get into a PhD program without getting a Master’s first. So if you already know you will want to take classes past the Master’s, you should be aiming for PhD programs.

1) All PhD programs in I/O in the US are designed as either 5-year or 6-year programs. People that come in with a Master’s degree usually want to skip the first few years. This is not always possible and may be undesirable to the university.

2) It is only potentially harmful if you want to use your Master’s hours to count toward your Ph.D. This is what most Master’s students want. Otherwise, you often need to earn a second Master’s degree in the new program. If you are willing to complete a second Master’s if the institution wants you to do so, this will help you and is something you should mention in your personal statement.

Without a Bachelor’s in Psychology, you may be disadvantaged. Especially with a low GPA and/or low GRE scores. Given your relatively low GPA, and given your goal of a Ph.D., I’d probably recommend enrolling in a Psychology Master’s program, ensuring you get a 4.0 and a publication or two, and then applying to Ph.D. programs with a statement that you’re willing to get a second Master’s. If you can get a Bachelor’s in Psychology without going through a complete program (i.e. if you can do it within a year or two), a second Bachelor’s in Psychology would also be sufficient and possibly preferable. Also, you can sometimes apply your previous credits towards a new degree or second major in ways that aren’t immediately obvious; I’d recommend you talk to advising. A business major and psychology minor would also be a reasonable path for many schools, and you may have time to complete a psych minor right now, depending on your institution’s requirements.

There are certainly jobs in I/O consulting that involve travel, if that’s something you want. International travel is uncommon, though.

If your sole goal is to be a practicing therapist, PsyD programs are generally sufficient for that. If you might ever change your mind and want to conduct research (e.g. to identify better treatments for your patients than are currently permitted/supported, and to contribute to your field professionally at a larger scale), then most are not. You simply don’t get the right kind of training in most of them.

I say most because there are more research-oriented PsyDs and less research-oriented PsyDs. The more research-oriented ones are generally better in terms of broad preparation (although you could not be an academic, you would more prepared to contribute to the field), but there are not as many research-oriented programs as practice-focused programs. ODU (where I am) actually used to have a research-oriented PsyD, in a consortium with neighboring universities (including William and Mary and UVA, I believe). But that entire degree program is being replaced with a PhD (this year, in fact).

Non-research-oriented PsyDs are purely practical degrees – like an MBA. It doesn’t prepare you for anything other than the precise career path it is designed to prepare you for, and this specific path varies school to school.

I would only recommend attending a Master’s-granting institution that has strong connections to industry and a track record of sending their students into I/O jobs. Such jobs generally pay over $60K. Honors, a thesis, and involvement on a study should be plenty for entry into a high quality Master’s program as long as your GREs are strong. Although I suspect there will probably be questions about why you finished off schedule (i.e. not in May) and what you’ve been doing in the interim and why.

By competitive, I assume you mean entry into PhD programs? I/O is less competitive than clinical. But then again, everything is less competitive than clinical. I remember in my graduate program, there was a lot of discussion about how our clinical PhD program rejected people with perfect GRE scores. I often find myself suggesting choosing a field other than clinical (and sometimes other than psychology) to undergrads that want clinical – usually they just want to “help people” in a clinical setting, That can be accomplished with a Master’s degree in Human Services, Counseling, Social Work, etc – a clinical PhD is generally not the best path to that sort of career.

I/O psychologists do not really deal with employee well-being as its own end. “Helping a displaced worker find a position” is not I/O – it is work counseling. If you want to do that, you should get a degree in counseling. We are focused on helping the organization reach its goals; however, that often (perhaps even usually) means helping employees along the way. For example, in working with an organization, we might discover that their team structure is dysfunctional and causing a lot of stress/strain for employes which limits the productivity of those teams, so we engage in work redesign to fix the problem – this helps the organization by helping the employees.

I/O does do work in medical contexts (e.g. I saw a piece on figuring out the best way to keep doctors up-to-date in terms of training), but it is not a focal area.

In 10 years, I think I/O will be much bigger – we are in the midst of a growth period, and I see no signs of stopping. One of the big challenges that we’re seeing now is that the “I/O” term is beginning to be used more broadly, and it is being used to sell products that don’t really represent what I/O is, or don’t represent it well. For example, training in I/O is no longer limited to PhD programs (which is fine), but a lot of Master’s programs have sprung up without the support structure such programs really need to ensure a high work placement rate (e.g. connections to local industry). So I anticipate some growing pains along with that growth.

Where did you see an estimate in the 1200s? That seems low to me, but at the Master’s level, could be accurate. But there aren’t very many I/O Master’s students, either.

I don’t think there are many jobs with the title “I/O” other than professor. Most I/Os go into either specialist positions within HR (e.g. assessment specialist, training designer, executive positions) or into a consultancy.

A Master’s degree as a terminal degree in I/O has not been around very long, and a lot of I/O Master’s programs are springing up. I honestly don’t know if there are jobs to support these students. The traditional degree is the Ph.D. But like I’ve mentioned before, most jobs in I/O, Master’s or PhD, come about through the connections your degree-granting institution has with industry – for example, most (but not all) ODU grads going into practice go to one of a relatively small group of consultancies, but given that, our placement rate for graduates is 100%.

Just about the worst thing you could do would be to attend a relatively unknown I/O Master’s program – especially an online program – without a job lined up already. It would be exceptionally difficult to land a position with that sort of education and without industry connections.

We sometimes are. But I think the reason most people don’t call themselves I/O psychologists in the work environment is because of the most common response one would get: “What is that?” or “Why do we need a psychologist?” The most common response I get now when saying I’m an I/O Psychologist is, “Oh I know someone you’d love to analyze!” The public misconception about what most psychologists do means that when you’re trying to sell your services to a client, it’s more profitable and easier to say “I’m a consultant” versus “I’m a psychologist.”

Business psychology is mostly the same thing – there isn’t a field called “business psychology” per se, but I/O might be considered under that heading, along with Career Counseling and a couple of related fields. So I would say “business psychology” is a label that includes several distinct fields, including I/O Psychology, but does not represent a distinct field itself. The exception to this is “work psychology” or “work and organizational psychology” which are common European terms for I/O.

And I absolutely find the work I do rewarding – few social sciences have such broad practical impact on people’s lives. Time spent at work makes up about half of most people’s waking lives before retirement. What better place is there to help massive numbers of people? Better training helps people do their jobs better (more satisfying to them, more value to the organization), better selection creates a more pleasant workplace (better coworker relations, less process loss within the organization), better leadership is more inspiring, better teamwork, etc., etc. These are all processes that I/O psychologists can influence for the better through both research and practice.

The profit-focused side is still psychology – for example, understanding what human characteristics best predict job performance – but you seem to want more of the warm fuzzy side. We’d call that “more of an interest in the O-side than the I-side of I/O.” That’s a matter of job title. If you want the more “employee focused” jobs, you want jobs with titles involving things like “organizational development.” However, there do tend to be more jobs on the I side.

I will add though that the only way to improve the lives of those tens of thousands of employees at Walmart would be to work at Walmart and try to change things from the inside. There are many I/O’s trying to do just that – but it is a battle to convince upper management that such moves would ultimately be in the best interests of the company without obvious ROI. If you work in a company where employees are already happy and productive, what’s the point of your job? 🙂

I would actually say that “straight to Ph.D.” is more traditional in I/O than getting a Master’s degree first. In fact, you do not even need a Master’s to get a Ph.D., and there is no value to a Master’s once you have a Ph.D., except for the networking connections that you might gain from exposure to an additional institution (which is one of the most important things to get out of these programs – but a high quality Ph.D. program will give you plenty). I don’t have a Master’s, myself – only the Ph.D. The quality of the program is much more important – there’s Master’s training at some institutions that is superior to Ph.D. training at others.

I certainly do, which you can find on my main webpage (http://rlanders.net).

If it’s anything other than “I/O”, it’s going to be more about the classes you take than the specific concentration. So whatever gets you more statistics. 🙂

The traditional Ph.D. market is quite good right now. I could probably walk out the door of ODU and get a practitioner job within two weeks any time I wanted, and we have a 100% placement rate at ODU (Ph.D. only). That is probably not as true for Psy.D.’s or online Ph.D.s though. The Master’s market is also a bit more iffy, primarily because the quality of I/O Master’s degrees is getting a bit diffuse. If you attend a respected program, I doubt you’d have any trouble getting a job.

I’m afraid the best answer I can give you is “maybe.” It will depend entirely on the particular program. I would ask their graduate program director for stats on their placement rate in the first year after completion of graduate study. If it’s below 95%, or if they don’t have that information, I’d be worried.

It is preferable to apply directly to a PhD program post-BA/BS without a Master’s. Completing a Master’s first actually will generally lead to problems and/or make it more difficult to get into a PhD program. That is only a path you want to take if you are unable to get into a PhD program.

That chances of getting into a competitive PhD program vary based upon your qualifications. But in terms of pure numbers, most decent programs have an acceptance rate in the 3%-8% area. That is why it is recommended you apply nationwide. I would not stick to California; there are fewer high quality I/O PhD programs the further west you go – schools are concentrated in the midwest and east coast.

Calculus lies underneath many of the statistics used in I/O graduate programs, but most problems do not peek quite that far under the hood. I wouldn’t even say that an understanding of calculus helps all that much in understanding statistics or how to use them – they are very different skill sets. The stats in I/O start with basic z-tests and t-tests, up through ANOVA and regression, and all the way up to multilevel and structural equations modeling. But the most complex math you need, even at the high end, is probably matrix algebra. And a lot of students get away without even learning that.

I don’t know that “up to 3” is a good rule. It differs by program. I would look for at least 3 though.

There are fewer PhD programs that will take people with Master’s degrees, and they are generally not very strong. There are exceptions though.

I also would not pursue most online programs, for the reasons I describe here: https://neoacademic.com/2012/05/09/grad-school-online-or-brick-and-mortar-io/

I’m not going to comment on particular programs, because the specific strengths and weaknesses between programs are myriad – but I think you may not realize that you don’t really “transfer” from a Bachelor’s to a Master’s program. There is a fully distinct application process. If you want to pursue a career path in I/O, and you wanted to start down this path immediately after high school, I would recommend attending a university with an I/O program for both your Bachelor’s and Master’s. Both are important, although your Master’s institution is more important.

For now, I would start by emailing a few graduate students in each department and asking how they like it, and if they’d recommend it.

I’ll also say that targeting a particular school for a Master’s – or even a particular region of the country – is a terrible idea. You really want to cast a wide net and apply to a range of schools of different quality levels across the country. For college, I would apply to at least 6 or 7 colleges with strong undergrad I/O programs. Once you see where you get in, make the decision then – if you have the option between local and not-local, you can make that decision then. But if you don’t get in anywhere local, you don’t want to be forced to not attend college because you only applied to 2 places.

Although you can aspire to attending a Master’s program at Portland, it is not a good idea to pin your hopes on attending a specific school. It rarely works out that way. You will need to obtain high GRE scores, a high GPA, and research experience during your time in college. And even if you have all those things, you won’t necessarily get into the programs you want to get into (for the reasons I detail here: https://neoacademic.com/2011/08/03/grad-school-where-should-i-apply). The median first-year salary for I/O’s with Master’s degrees is around $52K; the median first-year salary for I/O’s with doctoral degrees is $80K. This varies by position type though. I don’t know where you got $90K – that is around the 70th percentile (see http://www.siop.org/2012SIOPIncomeSurvey.pdf).

I’m not sure what you mean by “bother”. You need at least a Master’s to pursue a career in I/O. A Bachelor’s alone will not enable that.

If you want to maximize your chances, both. Straight A’s across an I/O focused degree and starting to work in psychology research laboratories (preferably at least one I/O lab, plus at least one other) in your first year of that program would improve your standing dramatically.

Having said that, it might also be a worthwhile exercise to stop and think seriously about if an I/O career is really right for you. At this point, if you won’t be able to get straight A’s in difficult I/O related courses (e.g. a double major in psychology and statistics with a business minor), it’s not worthwhile to attempt a second degree. You already have a low GPA degree, and you can’t escape that. So if you can’t get your GRE any higher, you’re already penalized in two ways; you need to be that much more impressive with your other qualifications, and that may not be realistic.

When you have a long-term goal, and you’re highly committed to that goal, it’s easy to get trapped into thinking that it’s the only way forward. But if you sit down and think seriously about your career goals, you might find that there are other options. I don’t know if this will be true for you, of course – but it’s something you should really carefully consider before committing the next 3 or 4 years of your life.

That’s a tad bitter/cynical, but still contains some good advice. 🙂 I would actually rephrase it to say that a PhD is never worthwhile from an earning power perspective, in management, I/O or anything else. You should only pursue a PhD if you are passionate and self-motivated in your chosen area of study. There is not really any other good reason; there are majors where you can earn more than a PhD with a BS or MS, even within field (e.g., the salary of someone with a Bachelor’s of Computer Science is in many cases higher than the salary of someone with a Ph.D. of Computer Science). There are some important differences between business schools and I/O programs, but in terms of earning potential, they are not generally very important as far as prepping you for consulting practice goes.

I’m not quite sure what you mean by “I/O programs are dying off in some places” due to lack of funding… here, we more often feel pressure to expand larger than we are comfortable doing given the resources we have (e.g., by being asked to add a large I/O Master’s program). The problem is not so much that programs are dying off, but that faculty as being asked to do more with less. But that is pretty common across academia, these days.

“Practitioner” is typically code for “easier to get into, less difficult, and less research-oriented.” However, as long as they have a pipeline into industry, that doesn’t matter much. When you say “a lot of the students” go back to teach, do you have a sense as to whether that is by choice? Some people find they enjoy teaching more than they think they would. But it may mean that the school artificially inflates its job placement numbers by hiring everyone that can’t get a job. I would dig further. 🙂

So… for comparison in terms of “researchy-ness”, I would consider the first two years of our doctoral program (pre-Master’s) to be pretty “research heavy.” My goal with new students is to have them running a research project from Day 1 (called a first-year project) which they will complete by the end of the first year. Over the first summer, they develop a thesis proposal, which they defend in August, then run their project over their second year. The goal is for them to defend their thesis by May of their second year (or August at latest). I also try to involve them in 1 or 2 other projects during this time, and if they’re ambitious, they might start one or two of their own. My current first year student has already helped write a book chapter, is about to wrap up his first-year project, is starting up two additional projects, is part of the team for a fourth project, and is beginning to put together ideas for his thesis proposal. I’m also potentially pulling him in on a research grant or practitioner project (depending on how things work out) next academic year. So that is the kind of experience you are potentially competing with on the job market, and writing one proposal that you never actually conduct is not going to look very good, in comparison.

Now of course, programs vary a lot, even within “research heavy” programs, and our program is in preparation for later doctoral work. But if you ever potentially want to join a doctoral program, you’ll need this kind of experience pre-Master’s. So if pushing on to the PhD is on your eventual career radar, I’d be careful now. Changing programs by itself also doesn’t guarantee you that kind of experience, unless you’re getting into a good program. If you are already in a job where people are saying “if you get a Master’s, you can move up the HR career ladder”, and that’s your only goal, it doesn’t matter so much where you go or how rigorous your experience is. But if you’re trying to gain a useful skillset, that is where you need to be more careful.

If you change schools, you’ll need to include all transcripts, and they will probably pay more attention to graduate than undergraduate – but this will vary by faculty member reviewing your application. Note that it is impossible to “transfer” in the undergraduate sense – you will need to retake all classes. No graduate classes transfer across universities, unless you are post-Master’s and applying for PhD. Even then, you may need to retake some Master’s-level courses.

If you have any publication experience, that is better than no publication experience. I’m not understanding how you have published anything without doing what we would normally consider lab work. Do you mean it is a theory development paper? As long as you can explain what this is in your personal statement, and can make an argument as to why it prepares you for grad school, this will be good. The experience you need is not precisely “working in a lab” but “getting experience with research.” Running participants, conducting analyses, writing up papers, etc. So if that’s what you did, you are positioned well (at least in this way). You still need a strong GPA, GRE scores, letters of recommendation, etc.

Well… that’s a very complicated question.

First of all, the study that you’re referring to 1) had entry requirements for which programs it ranked – so you’ll notice that a lot of schools aren’t even on that list, like Phoenix or Capella, and 2) is a ranking of research productivity. That is not at all the same as “employability” or “quality of education,” although productivity is likely correlated with these things. Because of the particular entry requirements to get on that list, pretty much any school on that list is going to give you a well-rounded, research-oriented education, and you’re likely to have plenty of job options. Anything in that list is probably going to be fine because the list is made up almost entirely of good programs. At ODU, for example, we don’t take Master’s students at all, but we have a 100% placement rate for PhDs up and down the east coast. It is a similar situation for almost all of those schools.

I doubt that reputation plays out the way you’re thinking it does. You’re probably thinking “higher up the list means more opportunities,” but it is more subtle than that. For example, because I went to Minnesota (which is ranked #1 by US News and World Report, by the way ;), I randomly find myself being contacted by folks I went to grad school with, and by other people connected to Minnesota, with random opportunities. But that is true of pretty much every school on that list – each has an alumni network that you will be connected to, and each will bring advantages unique to the particular type of training you receive. It does not so much play out in the “oh you went to School A so I will offer you a job instead of the person who went to School B”. That would be very unusual – it still comes down to qualifications, which is typically in the form of internship experience, publications, and conference presentations.

In terms of career earning potential, I would not put off a year of school “just in case” you can get into a higher ranked school later. The loss in earning potential from essentially taking a year off will not be worth it. Even if you can get into a higher ranked school, you’re very unlikely to get THAT many more opportunities as a result to justify losing a year of work experience (and the associated $60K-90K of first-year salary). That leaves the option you describe – switching programs post-Masters.

But switching programs is extremely difficult. Many programs do not take post-Master’s students into PhD programs by default. If they do, such students often need to redo Master’s coursework. For examples, we’ve taken a couple of post-Master’s students into our PhD program over the last decade or so, and each ended up redoing most of the Master’s coursework – one even completed an entire second Master’s degree because the coursework the student had already taken didn’t really match up to our degree requirements. So I would definitely not rely on that. It also takes an EXCEPTIONALLY highly qualified post-Master’s student to get into a PhD program in general. When you’re coming out of undergraduate, it’s expected you haven’t done much career-wise. If you already have a Master’s, you’ve had a few years to show what you’ve got – to demonstrate what kind of grad student you are – so if you don’t have a publication post-Master’s, you look like a MUCH worse candidate than an undergraduate without a publication. Past performance is the best predictor of future performance, after all.

I’ll also mention that switching programs is likely to anger whatever faculty are in the program you’re switching out of – and one of the things about I/O is that we are a VERY small community. That kind of anger can follow you around your entire career. I wouldn’t risk it.

That small-world quality also means that most people hiring IO PhDs know what schools IO PhDs come from. So what you think of as a no-name school may be just the opposite within the IO community. When I look around #30 on the list I think you’re looking at – Waterloo, Calgary, Ohio, Clemson, De Paul – I don’t have firsthand experience with any of them, but by reputation, they all look like solid schools to me.

I don’t know about “considerably.” It depends how good you are. The top-tier psych chaired psych faculty make about as much as the top-tier business school faculty. Business school faculty just start higher right out of grad school. But that’s probably necessary – most psych faculty need that incentive to switch to the business school environment, which has a lot of extra downsides (see, for example, http://qz.com/228387/why-i-stopped-teaching/).

I try not to comment about specific programs, in part because they change (sometimes drastically) from year to year. I will say that programs in major cities are advantageous because you are likely to be connected to a larger local alumni network. At least, assuming you want to stay local.

I’m not sure what a Public Health degree even teaches you, so I can’t really speak to the relative value of the degrees. Although maybe that’s the problem you’ve been having. I would not condemn all Master’s degrees because you don’t have a useful one. 🙂

I/O Master’s degrees, at least from decent institutions, are highly employable. They are generally highly skills based, mostly in academic literature review, statistics, and research methods, which are also the skills most I/O practitioners use for a living. If the folks at the school you’re attending all have gotten jobs in I/O within the last 5 years or so, you are set and I would stop worrying. The job market for I/Os is very different than what you probably have experience with – it is largely based upon word of mouth and interpersonal networks. So if you already know those networks are in place, you’re golden. You can’t get an I/O job without an I/O degree – the skills are simply too specialized (most people don’t need to use SPSS for their jobs, but that is why I/O pays better!).

Also, 30 is not all that late for a career change. 🙂

Research experience during graduate school is generally the key to employment in I/O. I/O is research. When we go in to help an organization, we collect data on the problem they’re having, use research literature to support an approach to solving that problem, and then conduct research to ensure that it worked – and if it doesn’t, what should be done next. If you aren’t doing that, or at least some portion of that, you aren’t really doing I/O work.

At the Master’s level, it doesn’t particularly matter what area you specifically get research experience in, as long you are motivated to learn through your experience. Work hard, learn a lot. So passion for the particular research area is not vital, although it does help you stay motivated. If you’re completing an empirical thesis as part of your Master’s, then it’s a bit more important. This is very, very important at the PhD level, since you’re building toward a dissertation (where motivation is way, way more important).

Any research area you see in an I/O textbook is a “major” area. These things wax and wane constantly, so it’s hard to say what is “upcoming”. If you’re pursuing a Master’s, you don’t really need to worry about grants anyway. Most grants require a multi-year application process, and you will have graduated before the grant you worked on it likely to be awarded.

I’m not sure which schools exactly are on the US News top 30 these days, but I will hazard a guess that it is not possible. Even middle-ranked schools will have minimum cutoff GRE scores, below which no human being will ever even look at your application. The traditional path for someone with poor GRE scores is to pursue a Master’s first, prove themselves in such a program, and then try for Ph.D. afterward. I will say, however, that most students I’ve known with poor GRE scores that attempted a Master’s program decided from their experience in that Master’s program that it was fortunate that they didn’t go into a Ph.D. program, because they would have probably ended up dropping out anyway.

Side note: I would not trust the US News rankings as a sole indicator of quality. There was actually a program or on the rankings for several years that did not technically exist at the time – almost all of the I/O faculty had left the program and so there were not enough faculty to teach any of their grad students. Several students had no advisor. Despite that, it was still a “US News ranked program”!

Publication is absolutely required for a tenure-track research-oriented job, and I’d say you want 5 to 10 to have a decent shot at a job. Teaching-oriented jobs will require fewer, as few as none in some cases.

For a practitioner route, it depends a lot on the particular job. If you want a job in an I/O firm (the PDIs, PDRIs, HumRROs and such), you’re probably going to need at least a couple of pubs. But more is always better, and may give you a leg up over other job applicants.

Univariate statistics is the basis for multivariate… I don’t actually see how you could successfully complete a multivariate course without a good handle on univariate statistics. But the course you’re describing looks to be focused on analysis of experimental data. Vital for research, since experimentation is the only way to demonstrate causality, but probably less so for practice.

As with a lot of questions recently, this really comes down to the specific programs you’re talking about, and is a decision you’ll need to make for yourself. But if the decision was between something like a Master’s at George Mason University versus and a PhD at University of Phoenix – I’d go for the Master’s at Mason.

I/O is not a new field – it’s a small field. I/O can be traced back to at least 1917.

Job prospects are pretty great in I/O as long as you go to a school that is well-respected or has good industry connections. As I’ve mentioned to a bunch of other folks in these comments, my university’s I/O program has a 100% placement rate. Every student we’ve graduated with a PhD has ended up with a great job. That is true of most PhD-granting institutions, but not all (especially the online ones). At the Master’s level, things get a lot trickier. You really need to talk to some current and recently graduated Master’s students from the programs you’re interested in to get a sense of how they feel about the job market.

A Master’s of HR is a very different sort of degree. I/O psychology is the science of human resources – we run research studies to understand how people fit in their jobs, how to train people, how to identify leaders, etc. – the psychology of people at work. HR is just HR. Just look at the other people in your HR office to see what kind of job you could get with a Master’s in HR. An I/O would never have any of those sorts of roles. So you can think of an I/O as a “behind the scenes” sort of person, and HR as the front line. As a result, there are fewer I/O jobs than HR jobs – although most organizations would benefit from I/O, it’s not something most orgs worry about until they’re fairly large. So if you get an I/O degree, you’re likely to need to move more – I know folks that have gone up and down the eastern seaboard following jobs.

I’ll also add that if you aren’t getting research experience while working as an HR assistant, your chance of getting into a decent PhD program is nearly zero. The kinds of places you could get into are not the kinds of places that will give you good job prospects. So I’d recommend if you want to pursue that path, you need to volunteer in a lab somewhere local for at least a year and apply in the 2015/2016 application cycle. If you want to pursue a Master’s, your HR experience will probably be sufficient, and you could apply this year.

It all depends on how well you are able to take advantage of that year-and-a-half. If you’re already set to transfer, I would work ahead to ensure that there is a psych lab (or two) ready to get you involved immediately, and even see if you can work ahead with that lab (e.g., by driving over or via email) before you transfer. If you do that, and if you communicate clearly that your goal is to apply to a PhD program, to get all the experience you can, to devote up to 20 hours per week on lab activities, with a goal of getting involved in a national conference presentation or two by the end of your junior year, and you find a faculty member willing to help you do all that, the extra year won’t really help you.

If I were you, I would probably do that – but then, after applying to graduate schools, see if I got into any PhD programs – if I didn’t, I’d then go back and add the second degree or otherwise find a way to stay local while working in the lab. But simply having a second degree is not going to help you much, if at all. So I would not prioritize that, if you’re set on an I/O PhD. It would be much more helpful to have a second degree, or even a second minor, in something like Statistics or Analytics.

In I/O psychology, there are only perhaps 2-3 people that study gamification, and one of them is me. I would not recommend stating that as a research area – it is too narrow as a focus. If you are more broadly interested in motivational interventions, or a sense of play in the workplace, those might be a little better. It would certainly be helpful if you’d done research in the area you want to go into, but this is extremely uncommon among applicants. I would not worry about it – a high level of research experience, with experience using a variety of different research-related skillsets, will be much more valuable. If possible, you want experience conducting literature reviews, designing studies, proctoring research sessions, recruiting participants, preparing ethics committee review materials, running statistical analyses, preparing manuscripts, and discussing research with faculty. The more, the better!

Are you just asking about those three? If so, cognitive psych probably won’t help you much, but the other two are fine.

By the end of your Master’s, assuming you’re taking 3 courses per semester for two years, you should have had at least 4 dedicated I/O seminars of some sort (intro to I and intro to O are common, plus two more general I/O courses), plus at least 2 stats and methods courses. If you complete an empirical thesis, you’ll probably have 1 or 2 thesis courses worth of thesis credits – if not, those should be additional dedicated I/O courses. If you take non-I/O courses, the most useful are going to be personality and social.

I wouldn’t go further outside I/O, if you can avoid it.

Promotion to these kinds of positions is much more about the person – especially their political skill – than anything to do with education. I’d say it’s probably more common to take that path with an MBA, but either is possible. However, the greater concern is that you’re going to be working at least 10 years (on the low end) to get to that point, so you’d be much better off choosing something to fill your days that you’ll actually enjoy. The day-to-day tasks of a finance officer, economist, and I/O psychologist are all quite different.

That’s going to vary tremendously by organization and by position. Could be either.

If you attend a decent Master’s program, you should be getting work experience along the way, usually random applied projects each semester plus an internship between Year 1 and Year 2. So that should be taken care of, at least in a decent program.

A PhD in HRD is usually designed to teach you to be business school faculty. You rarely get much, if any, practical experience. The PhD programs that are practitioner-focused are generally not much better than an MBA (these are usually called “executive education”). But these are two very different paths.

As I’ve mentioned in a few other comments, prestige in I/O is not so much the important component as the specific experiences you gain along the way and the employability rate of graduates.

So for PhDs, pretty much all ranked programs are highly employable. Old Dominion, where I work (for example), is generally ranked in the 20-40 range. We have a 100% placement rate. One of my students even had 3 different offers for a summer internship. So if you can get into any PhD program, and you make an honest go at it and come out with a few publications, you probably won’t have a problem finding a job.

For Master’s, things are different. You really need to talk to current students anywhere you are considering, because currently available rankings don’t really tell you much.

For your particular degree path, it really depends on what you did at those schools. Prestige itself doesn’t matter as much what being at those schools enabled you to do. So if you got some lab experience, or practical experience, as a result of attaching to those schools, then you will be better positioned. For example, I was able to run my own research project as an undergraduate which was later published because I went to a big state school and found a faculty member that was happy to support me. In smaller schools, and in schools where faculty are overworked (high student-faculty ratios), that’s less likely to happen.

That’s going to vary a great deal from program to program, but quant does tend to be more important in most I/O programs. I would do both – apply to programs as deadlines pass with your old score, but retake and update your score (assuming it gets better) for applications due after that point. I would definitely add Master’s programs though, in case it doesn’t go up.

If your goal is counseling or social work, you probably shouldn’t be in psychology. Psychology is concerned with the application of social scientific principles to understand how people think and behave in a wide variety of situations, with the foundations of its knowledge formed in psychological measurement (psychometrics) and research design. It is an odd thing to ask about the “need” for I/O – we seek to understand workplace behavior in the same way that social psychologists seek to understand social interactions, that clinical psychologists try to understand mental disorders, that quantitative psychologists try to understand the measurement of mental processes, etc. If you think that the practice of psychology involves helping people in a hands on sort of way, I’d suggest you don’t really understand psychology very well. And if you criticize I/O for these things, you criticize all of psychology. Which is an understandable perspective, but an odd stance for a psych major.

Having said that, there are certainly specialities within I/O that are more help-others-oriented. As an example of a research speciality within I/O, some people are focused on saving lives and reducing injuries in high-risk environments like mining and construction (i.e., occupational health psychology, which is a cross-cutting area within I/O). Others try to offer their expertise to help those in developing nations (i.e., humanitarian work psychology, in which members have helped people become self-sufficient by starting and managing businesses throughout Africa). I personally find helping people learn more effectively with technology to be compelling – right now, so much time and money are wasted on technologies that do no good to those using them. We waste resources adding useless training programs, and those resources could benefit employees in more direct ways. Understanding why and how people learn is the key to fixing that problem.

It all depends on your personal passions. No one is going to teach you how to save the world, no matter what field you go into. It’s up to you to make the bridge between what you know and what you want to do with it.

Assuming you’re talking about getting into grad school in I/O, no, not really. Finance doesn’t play a significant role in anything I/O-related. I would suggest Psychology or Statistics.

No, because an undergraduate degree in psychology is not a difficult degree to obtain in the grand scheme of things, and you don’t really have many (often, any) marketable I/O skills as a result of obtaining that degree. The primary purpose of an undergraduate degree in psychology is to qualify you to enter graduate school in psychology. If you pursue an MBA, you are preparing to go into management, which includes HR, but it is certainly broader than that. Like I/O, the employment rate of MBAs differs dramatically by school. Although we have a 100% employment rate, a number of I/O programs, mostly the for-profit ones, don’t. Last I heard, the employment rate for MBAs was around 80%, although two-year programs are a bit better. But I imagine the employment rate at Harvard Business is probably 100% too.

Well, if you do change career paths, the first thing you’ll learn is that the Myers-Briggs and related Jungian approaches to personality, scientifically speaking, are not very good. 🙂

I don’t have much of a technical answer for you, but I will say that my original intended career path – from about age 2 through college – was computer programming. And I am pretty introverted myself. I seem to recall reading somewhere that people who pursue PhDs tend to be more introverted, in general.

As for success in the business world, it depends a bit on what part of the business world you want to interact with. If you want to be more on the behind-the-scenes side, running statistical analyses and writing reports, there is certainly room for that. If you want to be more of the deal-making sort, moving up the corporate ladder, that certainly benefits extraverts a bit more.

Personally, part of my decision to become a professor is because the total required time spent in the presence of other people is generally less than 10 hours per week (except around finals anyway), and as a result, I also usually work from home. Most consulting positions are not nearly so isolated.

One of the things you’ll discover about IOs is that we tend to be very data-oriented. We pay attention to the V and Q dimensions of the GRE because there’s a sizable body of evidence that those scores predict graduate outcomes (time to completion, number of pubs in grad school, persistence to degree, etc). The writing section has no such evidence that I am aware of. In fact, the only study that I recall demonstrated that it was only moderately correlated with other, more typical assessments of writing ability/skill. So as a result, I don’t think many IOs pay much attention to it, especially accompanying an otherwise high quality application. I’d actually guess that the quant score is more likely to hurt you than the writing score (relatively speaking).

I don’t think a 3 would hurt you at any of the schools you’ve mentioned, Minnesota and Michigan included. There just isn’t much evidence that writing scores predict much about future grad school performance.

710-equivalent is low enough to make you middle-of-the-pack for Minnesota/Michigan, but it is in the right range to competitive in (the broad range of) typical schools. I did not saying it was “low” but rather that it was relatively speaking of greater concern than the writing score.

I would really caution you against interpreting rankings as being so meaningful. When I applied to grad school about a decade ago, I was accepted by Minnesota, Michigan and UIUC but was rejected by Rice and a few others. There is just so much going on in admissions decisions that if you have a competitive applications (i.e., no particular weaknesses – high GPA, high verbal and quant GRE, at least 2 years research experience in one or more labs, strong letters from faculty you’ve conducted research with, and a personal statement that hits all the key points), it is really in your best interest to apply very, very broadly, because you never know for what reasons that have nothing to do with your qualifications that you will or will not receive an offer for. Sometimes it comes down to personality match (or mismatch) between the advisor and applicant. You really just never know without applying.

When I was applying to grad school, I was similarly worried about application fees. A wise professor in my department told me, “Remember that you’re applying for training in a career that should ultimately earn you over $5 million in lifetime earnings, and maybe much more. A few extra $60 application fees to make sure you get into a PhD program is worth it.”

I wouldn’t say that it is “not worth attending” such schools if you’re pursuing a PhD. PhD training, as long as you’re talking about a non-profit research university, is just about the same everywhere. That is because most research universities are employed by graduates of those top programs – for example, at ODU, I went to Minnesota, two of my colleagues went to Michigan State, another George Mason and another Colorado State. We all bring our interpretations of the training we received (although some more recently than others) to our own students. This results in a sort of “core” I/O knowledge and perspective that gets passed on generation to generation of I/Os, regardless of PhD program.

The only area where I might suggest avoiding mid or lower tier schools is if you want to ultimately work as a professor at a high-tier school. If you graduate from FIT, it would be difficult to get a job at Michigan State. But of course, it’s difficult to get a job at Michigan State regardless. 🙂

I would also recommend thinking about fit in addition to simple rankings. You’re more likely to love your grad school experience if you go to a school to research something you’re passionate about. You’re spending 5 years of your life learning everything you can about something, after all. So if there’s someone researching something you personally find intensely amazing at a low-tier school, you’ll have a better experience at that low-tier school than anything higher ranked.

For Master’s institutions, reputation gets much trickier. But it sounds like that is not what you’re targeting anyway.

This is going to differ a bit depending upon who you ask, but I’d say the top-tier schools are Minnesota, Michigan State, USF, and Bowling Green. Maybe Penn State, although they had a significant change in I/O faculty recently. Mid-tier is pretty much every other school on the Top 40 list I posted (https://neoacademic.com/2014/09/17/sortable-io-psychology-ph-d-program-rankings/) – almost all of those schools will have 100% employment rates after graduation, if that’s what you’re worried about. Anything not listed I’d say is low-tier, and will be a bit more hit-or-miss.

Also remember that rankings change. People retire and program faculty change. Maryland was clearly top-tier about a decade ago, but then almost every faculty member working there left in the same couple of years. So now, it’s not quite as recognizable (although that doesn’t mean it’s not a strong program). The most recognizable programs are generally recognizable because they have best-of-the-best faculty who also happen to be people that haven’t changed jobs for many years. Minnesota, for example, has had Campbell, Sackett, and Ones for many decades, and they are all instantly recognizable names in the world of I/O. If they left/retired, Minnesota would lose a lot of that status.

Anything for-profit is not worth considering, at least right now. I’ve seen Phoenix students posting on message boards asking how to do a dissertation because they’ve never done a research project before. That’s terrifying to me – my students will have done at least 5 or 6 pre-dissertation, and I would push for more, if there was time.

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, because I/O psychology is relationship-oriented, reputation of your particular program isn’t going to carry much weight _in general_ unless you’re in the top-tier programs (i.e., instantly recognizable as a top tier program by pretty much all I/Os). Otherwise, it’s all about who your particular school has sent graduates to (that did well).

MBAs are different, because an MBA is a fairly easy degree to get, in the grand scheme of post-graduate degrees. Getting an MBA from a top-tier program at least suggests that the student actually knows at least a little something about business. I wouldn’t assume that to be true with just an MBA from anywhere. All Master’s degrees suffer from this sort of problem to some extent, which is why reputation matters a lot more with a Master’s degree – there are a lot of very easy Master’s degrees. There are not very many easy PhDs.

Wright State actually has a great reputation within the I/O world. You are probably basing your opinion primarily on your exposure to the school in general – which is usually a consequence of having a popular sports program or living in close proximity to it (there’s actually research on this). Remember that I/Os generally hire I/Os – our popularity with business people in general is not very important for our employability. But this does highlight why I wouldn’t recommend you trust rankings quite so literally. 🙂

I wouldn’t recommend you base a career on trends. 🙂

Long-term, you will be best off with as much statistics training as you can get. Even if the particular stats you learn aren’t ultimately useful, the experience will still increase your overall competence with stats in general, making it easier to learn new stats when you need to. This is the #1 way to differentiate yourself from other “consultants”, even among I/Os.

I would avoid the business courses entirely. None of those will serve you very well in I/O – they just dilute your expertise. Remember that if you have expertise others don’t (for whatever reason), you will end up getting tapped to do those tasks. If you’re an I/O who knows compensation, you are more likely to get pulled into compensation projects. But compensation is BORING. So I would instead double-down on I/O topics (after adding in stats). If you have much wiggle room, I’d recommend you take them all.

Traditionally in I/O, I-topics tend to pay the best (there is always a demand for hiring, training, and performance management) and O-topics tend to be more squishy, which many I/Os do prefer – they enjoy just feeling out situations and conducting surveys and interviews to learn more about a situation and then apply their judgment to solve a problem. The I-side is more technical in nature. But the best way to learn both is to take classes in both!

Personally, if I needed 4 classes, I’d take the advanced stats, T&D, teamwork, and leadership, in that order. Adv social would be interesting but you should get most of the relevant content in teamwork and leadership anyway (teamwork and leadership both are essentially applied social psych, with a sprinkling of other areas).

Org behavior is essentially the same field as I/O… and in fact, I/Os that get doctorate degrees in business schools often have doctoral degrees in Management… so that’s an unusual path. You would need to be able to explain why you want to pursue a Master’s degree in a field that most people would think you already have a doctoral degree in. Another challenge would be that some programs require undergraduate coursework in psychology to enter a Master’s program in psychology – many students with a Master’s in another non-psych field end up taking non-degree-seeking undergrad courses in psychology before applying to deal with those requirements.

1) That is a complicated question, although I’m not sure from your question that you know what either involves. They are not at all similar. If you just want to “deal with people and their emotions,” that is not clinical at all – you are more likely talking about counseling psych or social work (not psych at all). Clinical is focused on mental disorder – bipolar, schizophrenia, personality disorders, etc. Some ordinary talk therapy is involved, but it is usually a bit more involved than that, interpreting research and developing therapy plans (e.g., administering CBT). I think all jobs involve “work in a work environment”, so I don’t know what you mean by that. Both clinical and I/O are statistics-intense, although PsyDs don’t involve as much, but I wouldn’t recommend a PsyD unless you can’t get into a PhD program. If your only goal is high salary, the process of getting a PhD will drain you of your will to live, so be careful there too.

2) Coursework by itself is not enough to get into a doctoral program in anything these days. But a Master’s in anything is not required. Most doctoral programs do not regularly admit students with Master’s degrees. When we do accept a student with a Master’s, they usually need to complete a new Master’s in our program. That is pretty common.

I’m sure you’re capable of the work, because literally anyone is. The major difference as driven by GRE scores is how easy it will be to get through the program. For very highly qualified folks, it will be difficult, 60-hour+ weeks. For less qualified people, it will be 80-100+ hour weeks. Schools with lower average GREs tend to put more effort into student development whereas schools with higher average GREs tend to just shove you out to figure things out on your own. Regardless, I am thinking your problem is one of motivation. It is difficult to put 100 meaningful hours into something you hate.

If you’ve decided that you hate I/O definitively, I don’t see why you’d want to finish even the Master’s. It is going to look equally bad to start a Master’s and quit versus to get a Master’s and then change fields immediately. So if you have really decided you never want to have anything to do with I/O again, I’d quit now. I would initiate that, however, by telling your plan to your advisor and your department chair. Possibly your chair first. If your department is “nice”, they will let you stop attending classes but finish out your RA/TA for the semester, which will keep you employed but not require you to do any coursework. If they aren’t so nice, then you may need to find a job quite quickly. You’ll probably want to get a job using the Master’s you already have, since that will make a more compelling narrative, i.e., “I tried out this other field for a semester but decided my real home was x area”.

That is of course assuming you got a Master’s degree with a clear path to employment the first time around. If you didn’t, you’re likely looking at entry-level work.

I think you’re probably feeling the difference between Master’s and PhD more so than I/O versus other areas. Master’s programs are generally significantly easier than PhD programs, and they are generally targeted at a different kind of student. They are also generally easier since many departments partially fund themselves with Master’s student tuition. So there is some motivation not to make the program too difficult, HYP or otherwise. The gray area is with PhD programs that also offer Master’s – sometimes the Master’s courses in these programs are “Master’s level” and sometimes “PhD level”. At ODU, we have the courses on the books for a full-fledged Master’s program in I/O (Master’s level courses, Master’s thesis), but we don’t generally accept Master’s I/O students because the sort of student that generally goes for a Master’s is not usually capable of or motivated to do the work needed at the PhD level. Our Master’s courses are intended for 1st and 2nd year PhD students, not 2-year terminal Master’s students.

Also remember that the top graduates from top programs are generally the ones that end up working as faculty at mid-tier schools, and both the courses these former students teach (including the ones I teach) and our advising styles are almost all modeled on the courses and faculty we learned from at those top programs. There is a lot of Minnesota in the PhD courses I teach, and there’s a lot of Paul Sackett in my advising style. So difficulty and workload expectations are very similar across PhD programs, in general.

As for my students, I generally hear from 40-60 hours. Sometimes more when exam grading is due. I personally remember weeks at Minnesota where I did nothing but study, go to class, conduct research, and sleep, through weekends… I suppose that’s closer to 110 hours, but I could usually keep that number down with good planning and prioritizing. That was probably reading 10-15 articles per week across classes, plus running a couple of studies, plus lab meetings, research meetings, etc. I don’t know if you consider a happy hour with faculty to be work, but we did some of those too, and then went back to other work afterward. I ultimately sort of accepted that straight-As was simply not worth the time required, when spending your time on research instead will get you more career opportunities anyway. No one cares about grades after your graduate. It’s far healthier and a better use of time to take a “I’ll learn as much as I can in areas I find interesting and useful” approach, i.e. a mastery goal orientation. I would say that pursuing a PhD with a goal of “getting good grades” is an incredible waste of time, although many faculty certainly disagree with that.

At ODU, I try to maintain a sense of my advisees’ schedules and not give them extra projects to work on when they’re overloaded, but it’s hard to judge sometimes. Some students just think they aren’t capable of the workload when they really are perfectly capable, so I try to push them. That’s the only way people grow, you know. I try to push myself the same way, although it’s harder to be accountable to yourself. That’s more of an advising style issue though; some advisors just pile on work until their students break. Others let their students determine their own workload, which doesn’t generally work as well as you might think.

In any case, if you find I/O boring, you shouldn’t spend any time on it, let alone 80+ hours. If you don’t like it now, you’ll hate a career full of it. Leave already. 🙂

That is a tough one. The PhD definitely is a lot about mindset. You need to want it.

Try this. Imagine a career filled with research – reading papers, looking up research evidence on the best way to solve organizational problems, developing studies and analytic approaches to deal with those problems. Does that sound exciting? If so, you want the PhD and wherever you go that will get you that experience. If you want something less intense than that, where you’re just “helping out organizations”, you probably want the Master’s.

Keeping in mind, of course, the the Master’s is likely to cut your lifetime earnings about 10-20% versus the PhD (on average, anyway). Also keeping in mind that some PhDs are a little judgmental about their Master’s colleagues, which may or may not bother you. 🙂

Where things get fuzzy in your case is that some programs might be willing to accept you into the PhD program after you graduate, if you’re good enough. Both FIT and UCF have PhD programs, so you may actually be in classes with the PhD students for your two years. You may get a taste for it, in which case, you can apply for the PhD and potentially stay where you are. But it’s a riskier path – if you don’t get into a PhD program then, you’ve got to find a job – no other option. You might consider asking whoever your contacts are at UCF and FIT how realistic that is, if it’s an option you might want to pursue. I would call them and say “I have a PhD offer at UH but I like your program better; what do you think I should do?”, or if you’re feeling brave, “Is there any way you can make the decision easier?”

If you don’t have funding for the Master’s programs, this can be a way to get some. Maybe. Depends on a lot of external factors. Doesn’t hurt to ask though.

Many psychology PhDs don’t even know what I/O psychology is, so don’t feel too bad. 🙂

For overlap, it depends a bit on what you mean by “training and developmental manager.” An MBA in Human Resource Development will train you to run a training program. That means identifying training needs, developing or purchasing training modules, and administering them.

There is certainly a training specialty within I/O psychology, but the training will be significantly broader. You’ll also focus more on understanding why and how people learn from a psychological perspective (i.e., the psychology of learning) rather than as a business problem. You’ll also learn about the broader field of I/O – which includes selection, performance assessment, team function, leadership, etc. There is also a much greater focus on statistical analysis in I/O than in management.

For course work, you want to take as many advanced statistics and I/O related basic psychology courses as you can, in addition to any I/O courses available. That is principally social psych and personality psych. If you can take graduate level courses, do that; for example, when I was an undergrad, I took a graduate level psychometrics course. Honors courses and honors thesis help too. And of course, all of this should be done while working in one or two research labs.

Master’s vs. PhD is a personal choice, largely about motivation. I would recommend you read this page and all of the comments; there is a lot to it. As far as IQ goes, as you’ll hopefully learn in psychology, that’s not a terribly meaningful concept these days. But as to the underlying idea, yes, cognitive ability is important to obtaining a PhD. Those with lower cognitive ability can still succeed at a PhD, but it will take much more time to reach the same level of competence.

There are not distinct careers in industrial vs. organizational psychology. Some programs more greatly emphasize one or the other, but both will be covered to some degree. Even if a program is called “organizational psychology” you will almost always still get some I-side material.

I’m also not sure what you mean by “transfer,” but if you’re talking about going to grad school after undergrad, remember you should be applying to at least a dozen or so schools. The chances you will get into any particular program are very poor unless you are phenomenally qualified (and there are less than a handful of such students worldwide in any given year that meet that standard).

I don’t really see them as covering the same phenomena, so they can certainly co-exist. Six Sigma is mostly about managing products and processes, whereas I/O is focused on managing people – including the people that apply Six Sigma. Six Sigma is vaguely based on the scientific method, so they even are of somewhat similar philosophies.

As for applying them, I don’t know that a person hired to be an I/O would find much use for Six Sigma. An I/O doesn’t usually help with business strategy, except perhaps in terms of strategic HR. So I would say Six Sigma training is probably only useful with a long-term goal to be general purpose consultant.

You certainly could, but you would might need to complete a second Master’s degree in I/O, depending upon the coursework in your first Master’s, as well as the nature/quality of your thesis. Some Master’s programs do not require theses; if you pursue that sort of Master’s program, you would definitely need to complete a second program.

I will note though that all PhDs are research-oriented, and all will involve research “in an academic environment.” If you don’t like research, you won’t like a PhD in anything. The practitioner’s degree for clinical psychology is a PsyD – it is not at all the same sort of training as a PhD.

Your biggest problem is that a 3.0 GPA will put you before the minimum possible GPA for a lot of programs. Ours for example – since you are below 3.25, I would not be able to accept you if I wanted to – it is to be blunt “against the rules.” What students in your situation do is either 1) use grade forgiveness programs to retake old coursework with low grades (this is the best strategy) or 2) take a lot of unnecessary electives to try to drag your GPA up.

Ignoring that, assuming you do well on the GRE, you sound like a fairly strong candidate. Just a year of research experience isn’t stellar, but it is what a lot of applicants have. So that means your main selling point will be match in research interests with specific faculty. So I’d pay a lot of attention to that.

Also, I wouldn’t trust the average acceptance GPA numbers on the SIOP website. Sometimes those numbers aren’t updated for many, many years. Even if you see the “last updated” as something recent, that’s just means something was updated, not necessarily the particular number you want to know about.

It depends on a few things. I would say that generally, no, it probably won’t matter, but I might regardless recommend a double-minor if you can find the credit-hours to do it, depending on what your university’s offerings actually look like. Some grad programs will require you have taken intro psych, statistics, and research methods to start a MS or PhD program. Having said that, the stats and methods courses you take in neuro might be similar enough in content that it won’t matter, at least for most schools.

Yours is a complicated and fairly unusual case, so you should be warned that this ups the idiosyncrasy factor quite a bit. Different faculty are going to have very different reactions to your application based on different aspects of your application. So I would first and foremost recommend applying very broadly.

If you have a letter of recommendation about your time as a non-psych researcher, but that letter speaks to specific research skills that are universal (critical thinking, work reliability, consistency, intellectual contribution), that will be “ok.” Since you don’t have a psych undergrad, that will matter a lot more to some people than to others. Taking some psych classes as a nontraditional student was a good idea, although it will only matter to some faculty.

The work experience is valuable and attractive I think to most programs. So I would emphasize that in your statement.

The biggest problem you have right now is that GRE Quant score. Our program (like many programs) first sorts on the basis of GPA and test scores. Your GPA is ok but not stellar, and your GRE is also a bit average for our applicants. The problem is that we only end up inviting people from about the top 10-20% of applicants to interview/join (selection tends to be normative), so that means you would likely not be very high priority in that list. If you don’t have a very high GPA, you need to get that GRE high to compensate. To be clear, your GPA isn’t low – I don’t think you really need to talk about it in your letter – it’s just not high enough to do much to counter a low GRE.

I would say you are a strong candidate for an IO Master’s program and an average candidate for a PhD program. Given peoples’ abilities to increase their GRE scores, and the other things you could do to improve your application, I don’t think I’d recommend your current plan. If you don’t get into PhD programs this year, there’s not much you could do to change your qualifications in a year given your unique standing, so I suggest you apply to both PhD and Master’s now. If you only get into Master’s and no PhD, then you can decide then, with offers in hand, if you still want to give up the Master’s offer and wait another year. Completing an “extra” Master’s is only a 2-year commitment, so waiting a year is half a Master’s. I don’t see that risk as being worth it, personally.

It’s quite different by program, but in general, you take classes and conduct research. I would strongly recommend when you transfer to a university to work in a psychological research laboratory as a volunteer. That will give you better answers to your questions than I can in this comment. General answers are all that is possible when responding to general questions. 🙂 In terms of things to do to ensure a strong application, including coursework, that is literally the purpose of this website; do all of the things I describe here and you should be in a relatively good position, pending good GRE scores.

I don’t think that’s an incorrect way to say it, although it does emphasize the publishing over the work. It’s not uncommon for people to say, “I was published in JAP,” for example; it just suggests that they might view getting into JAP as more important than the work itself. There are a lot of ways to express it, but I think I default to, “It ended up in JAP” (for example).

You’re certainly welcome! Be prepared to address those types of misunderstandings for literally the rest of your life. 🙂

If you want to be an HR analyst, the best thing you can probably do is get plenty of statistics and data science training and experience, and then develop an online portfolio to show off what you know. I created a data science course that you might find useful (http://datascience.tntlab.org) as a starting point.