Interest inventories have long been used in conjunction with assessments of other con-structs to understand career exploration and career choice. Recently, a number of researchers have called for increased utilization of interest inventories in personnel decision making, yet this call has received limited attention in Industrial-Organizational (I-O) psychology. I-O psy-chologists with expertise in employee selection and/or EEO law were surveyed. I-O experts in-dicated interest inventories may have incremental validity over traditional selection instru-ments and that interest inventories are unlikely to result in employer liability; experts identified potential uses of interest inventories in I-O applications other than selection. However, experts perceived interest inventories to have limited expected utility for personnel selection. That these latter perceptions are inconsistent with recent meta-analytic evidence supporting inter-ests as predictors of important individual and organizational outcomes indicates the need to educate I-O psychologists on the utility of interests in employee selection.

Generally, in statistics, the relationship between two variables, x and y, is represented by a Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient (r). However, it can be challenging for nontechnically savvy audiences to interpret the coefficient without extensive statistical knowledge. I-O practitioners often find themselves in situations where they have to deliver the results of correlational analyses to key stakeholders (e.g., company executives, board members, clients) in a nontechnical way. When presenting to senior leadership the results of the criterion-related validation study of a newly developed personnel selection test, I-O practitioners some-times discuss either the magnitude of the correlation coefficient (r; which in the 16 years of the authors’ combined practical experience has rarely made an impact) or a coefficient of deter-mination derived by squaring r. I-O academics face a similar situation when explaining the magnitudes of correlation coefficients to new students and individuals without statistical knowledge. In fact, the issue of communicating I-O findings to outside audiences has gained enough traction to merit a creation of a new column in TIP, Lost in Translation (Litano & Collmus, 2016). It is a common practice to report r2. Although widespread, this approach is mis-leading, because it may limit the interpretability of the statistic (Ozer, 1985; Schmidt & Hunter, 2014). Thus, neither of the aforementioned methods are effective in answering the bottom line question: Can the value of x predict the value of y?

For the last several years, SIOP has put great effort into emphasizing the prosocial side of our field.  This involves both science and practice that seeks to benefit others and/or society as a whole. It has included SIOP’s Veteran Transition Project, the Poverty Research Group, the Vol-unteer Program Assessment project, and many other individual projects led by SIOP members. SIOP also partners in multiple ways with the Global Organisation for Humanitarian Work Psy-chology in fulfilling their mission to bring together I-O and other areas of psychology with de-liberate and organized efforts to enhance human welfare. Our role within the SIOP United Na-tions Committee is to represent SIOP as a consultative nongovernmental organization (NGO) for the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations in promoting I-O knowledge in ways that will assist in the attainment of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals; and, con-sistent with SIOP’s participation in the UN Global Compact, to support initiatives that promote principles of human rights, labor fairness, environmental sustainability, and anticorruption.

SIOP members have, over the years, expressed interest in more practice-oriented publications. For example, in the 2008 Practitioner Needs Survey, “Provide a practitioner journal or newsletter” was one of the top rated services SIOP could provide, with 87% of respondents indicating it would be valuable or highly valuable for I-O practitioner development (Silzer, Erickson, Robinson, & Cober, 2008). Similar results were obtained in the most recent 2015 Practitioner Needs Survey, where providing a practitioner journal or newsletter was ranked among the top three most valuable services SIOP could provide for I-O practitioner development among full-time, part-time, and occasional practitioners (Ferro, Porr, Axton, & Dumani, 2016). Similarly, in the 2011 Member Survey, when asked “What additional services would you like to see SIOP provide?” multiple comments centered on the same notion (e.g., “Practitioner-focused newsletter;” “Practitioner oriented publication; ” “A forum for best practice sharing of practitioners”; SIOP, 2011).

A new local I-O group, The Georgia Association for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (GAIOP), was officially incorporated as a not-for-profit professional organization on February 12, 2016. Our metro Atlanta-based group has a new face and new objectives; however, this is just the latest stage in the evolution of the I-O community in Georgia. This article is an account of how we got here, what we’ve accomplished, and what challenges remain. Because this leg of our journey is just beginning, we wanted also to describe our future aspirations in the hope that more professionals (and students) will want to join us. We hope that our story will be instructive for colleagues in other locations as they contemplate the costs and benefits of getting organized.