Overview from the Program Chair
It is that time of the year again, when we begin to focus our attention on the upcoming 2025 SIOP Annual Conference, the premier event within industrial-organizational psychology. The annual conference is a time when we come together to share our work and insights with one another, avail ourselves of the knowledge and experience of our ever-growing I-O psychology community, and bolster our professional networks with new connections while strengthening existing ones. It is an event focused on both past achievements and future potential.
There are some exciting new developments for the 2025 SIOP Annual Conference and into the future. First, the SIOP Program Committee is hard at work, and has been since conclusion of the 2024 SIOP Annual Conference, preparing a new submission portal. It was time to update, upgrade, and revitalize our submission, reviewing, and program building process. We hope you like the new system, and we ask for your patience as we work out any bugs that pop up along the way. Together, we can transition to a new and improved system while also making the SIOP Program wonderful for everyone!
The second exciting new development stemming from the new submission and review portal is the new reviewing expectation for submitters. In recent years, we have struggled to have enough members willing to volunteer to help review all of the many submissions we received. Starting this year, and with the support of the SIOP Executive Board, staff, and volunteers, all SIOP submitters will be enrolled as reviewers and complete the reviewer questions during the proposal submission process. Consistent with years past, all SIOP members will be invited to be reviewers even if they did not submit a proposal through the submission portal. This will ensure we have both the number of volunteer reviewers to undertake the massive process of reviewing all the wonderful submissions, as well as the high-quality folks needed to do the reviews themselves – all of you! We can’t do this without you, and we hope that everyone will be excited by this new opportunity to contribute, in a small but meaningful way, to the success of the SIOP Annual Conference.
Finally, SIOP is offering for the first time Research Community Forums the Wednesday afternoon before the conference (Apr 2), which will bring together individuals interested in research on a particular topic to create a platform to exchange thoughts and ideas and form collaborations to further advance research in the area. There are three Research Community Forums being organized for 2025: (1) Health and Well-Being in the Workplace, (2) DEI Interventions, and (3) Selection and AI. As part of the new submission website there is a new submission type designed for people interested in submitting information to share at one of these Forums labelled “Research Community Forum.”
We invite all of SIOP’s members to submit a proposal for the conference, become reviewers, and participate in the amazing conference planned for Denver in 2025. Please note, the submission deadline is Wednesday, October 9, 2024 at 5 pm ET.
Unlike previous years, we will no longer have a virtual conference experience. Demand in recent years for the virtual conference and eagerness to submit virtual sessions has waned. In fact, we have struggled to receive enough submissions to host the virtual portion of the conference, and virtual attendees have not felt that the virtual conference was nearly as valuable as the in-person experience. SIOP will be working to offer additional virtual content throughout the year to meet member needs for virtual learning offerings.
Despite the aforementioned changes and developments, the submission guidelines remain mostly the same as last year, albeit in a different submission system. When submitting proposals, speaker and non-speaking contributor roles will need to be assigned. The Rule of Three (see Eligibility) is based on the designation of an individual as a speaker, not author order. Student members may submit a proposal; however, all proposals must have at least one speaker who is a Nonstudent member (this rule does not apply to posters). Poster and IGNITE sessions are 50-minutes long. Other submissions can be either 50-minute or 80-minute sessions, but 50-minute sessions are preferred, as there are more 50-minute slots in the program schedule compared to the longer slots.
The SIOP Program Committee welcomes proposals that are aligned to SIOP’s vision, mission, values, and goals. All proposals should align with SIOP’s core values. Specifically, proposals should reflect excellence in the research, education, and practice of I-O psychology; they should inspire our effectiveness, foster a more inclusive and diverse professional community, and address real-world problems in a timely manner. In our recent past, we have all demonstrated our amazing ability to adapt to changing conditions. We once again call upon that creative thinking and innovation to maximize our potential positive impact with our conference programming.
We welcome your feedback as we collaboratively navigate these changes and hopefully help each other create a memorable and valuable conference experience for all attendees.
Joseph A. Allen (program@siop.org)
2025 SIOP Program Committee Chair