The first two columns that I wrote “set up” the science–practitioner issues, and the next three addressed three of the five significant ways in which I-O contributes to the employee lifecycle:

• June 2015: Performance Management
• September 2015: Staffing
• January 2016: Strategy and Measurement

This column will tackle the issues related to learning and development and the July TIP will address talent management.  To find how I-O contributes to all five employee lifecycle areas, from the SIOP website, click on “Professionals” and you will see “I-O and the Employee Lifecycle.” 

Frank Schmidt has provided the leadership to create a new endowment in the SIOP Foundation.  The Schmidt-Hunter Fund will support the Schmidt-Hunter Meta-Analysis Award. It will recognize the best advances related to industrial and organizational (I-O) psychology as documented in published research in which meta-analysis is used. The new award will be given by SIOP for the first time in 2017.

The availability of the personal computer (PC), statistical software, and the Internet has had undeniable effects on I-O psychology.  Without such technological advances, for instance, there’d be no virtual teams, no computer-adapted testing, and no cyberloafing.  To better appreciate the impact of technology on the current state of our discipline, it’s helpful to reflect on the technology used in the recent past.  In preparing this installment of the History Corner, we interviewed nine seasoned I-O psychologists: Terry Beehr, Ilene Gast, Lawrence Hanser, Milton Hakel, Norman Peterson, Susan Reilly, Neal Schmitt, Paul Thayer, and Lauress Wise.  We asked them each to describe the technology they used during their early careers to conduct data analysis, and we asked them to reflect on how technological changes have affected the way in which I-O psychologists conduct research.  In the following sections we discuss how calculators, early computers, and PCs were used “back in the day” to conduct data analysis.  We then discuss how I-O psychologists wrote their research reports prior to the advent of PCs and word processing programs.

In the July 2015 TIP, the SIOP Professional Practice Committee (PPC) presented the first of a series of articles reporting the results of the 2015 Practitioner Needs Survey that the PPC conducted between March and April 2015. The objective of the survey was to gather information about current needs of I-O practitioners to provide insights to SIOP leadership and committees (e.g., PPC, licensure, visibility) about developing future initiatives. In addition, the survey was designed to collect information that could be compared to the results of the 2008 Practitioner Needs Survey in order to examine progress on issues identified in 2008.

Graduate school is often a stressful period for budding industrial-organizational psychologists. One strategy for managing stress, both in graduate school and beyond, is the mindfulness-based intervention (MBI). This article examines the potential efficacy of MBIs for the graduate student population within a stressor-strain framework. First, we detail common graduate student stressors, then we define mindfulness and provide examples of mindfulness exercises. Next, we review meta-analytic evidence for the effectiveness of MBIs in reducing strain in broader populations. Last, we provide resources for beginning a mindfulness practice. Although this article focuses primarily on the graduate student population, the lessons learned from MBI research apply to most professional populations as well.