I’ve been thinking about change lately, prompted by an exciting email I received in January. Shelly Zedeck was wondering if I had any interest in his collection of old TIP issues. At first, I hesitated. I was only in California temporarily, so a logistics challenge presented itself. How would I transport these treasures from the West Coast to the East Coast? How many could I fit in my carry-on before resorting to shoving them in pockets or under my hat? After only a few minutes of deliberation, though, I decided the airline acrobatics were worth it.  I couldn’t pass up the chance to get my hands on this archive of SIOP history.  In case you are wondering, by the way, I can fit exactly 12 issues of TIP into my laptop case. Only three can fit under a hat.

This fourth and final President’s Message is dedicated to two major issues that SIOP and the profession of I-O psychology squarely face today and in our future. Let me elaborate on them here and hope they stimulate our continued thinking, discussion, and strategic actions as a society.

The first issue pertains to very notable and noticeable changes in our profession and membership within SIOP. Although these changes have been documented in the recent past (e.g., see Rob Silzer & Chad Parson, TIP, July 2015), they need to be reassessed more broadly and more often. To focus on one important example that is already impacting our future: Current trends reveal rapid growth in the number of terminal master’s I-O programs, along with the high volume of I-O psychologists coming out of them and working in an increasingly wider range of professional settings. Concurrent with this trend, or perhaps because of it, many PhD I-O programs are beginning to incorporate terminal master’s programs, both on-campus and online.

In our previous column, we discussed the complexity and nuances of measuring unobservable psychological phenomena and the importance of verbally communicating the value of reliability and validity evidence to non-I-O psychologists. Our interviews with Fred Oswald, Jeff Jolton, and Don Zhang were insightful, impactful, and extremely well-received by the SIOP community. However, we also received some feedback from I-O psychology practitioners that emphasized how much more frequently they communicate in the forms of charts, figures, and PowerPoint decks than simply in conversation, making it difficult to apply the lessons learned from our last column to their current roles. In fact, it is common in the business world to have your PowerPoint decks “walk” around the organization after your presentation, meaning that you must create your presentation to be interpretable and easily understood even without talking points to accompany the slides.

Over the recent years, influential industry analysts (e.g., Bersin, 2016; Haak, 2017) have repeatedly cited the shift to team-based work as a major business trend warranting a fundamentally reshaped approach to talent management and organizational structure. These disruptive forces are driving workflows that are less often hierarchical from a long-term supervisor and more often lateral among project-based teams, and processes that are less often serial and more often parallel using agile methodologies. Additional interest in workplace teams is also on the rise within major I-O publications such as the Journal of Applied Psychology (Mathieu, Hollenbeck, Knippenberg, & Ilgen, 2017). These trends piqued our interest in understanding the major trends across technologies that have shifted the way we work since our Modern App review of virtual working in Jan 2015, and to see what is top of mind in today’s practice and for today’s researchers.

Okay, so the title of this one is a joke,¹ but we should explain it briefly before we dive into the real topic here.

It rubs our sensibilities the wrong way when we hear about hiring practices that are anything but ironclad, legally defensible, and well validated. The use of unstructured interviews or clinical decision making or gut intuition, instances of nudging the results of a mechanical decision-making process if one doesn’t “like” the results, people hiring based on liking the cut of one’s jib – or, as we joked in our title, hiring based on similarities in musical preferences.² Perhaps it rubs your sensibilities the wrong way as well.