Lessons Learned from a Class Project

By second year I/O student, Meha Nepalia


I am very excited to share my experience of working on a class project. I did a team project for a course in my I/O program in which we conducted an employee attitude and behavior survey for an organization. The aim of this project was to learn about the process of assessing employee attitudes, apply research to a real world situation, and enhance our consulting skills. For this project we interacted with the client, conducted interviews, did a lot of research, created an employee attitude survey, analyzed the findings, and provided recommendations to the client.  During this project, I learned a lot from the experience and relied heavily on Peter Block’s book “Flawless Consulting”.

There are simple things that Peter Block talks about in his book “Flawless Consulting“such as sharing your thoughts about working with the client in your first meeting; this creates a comfortable environment and puts the client at ease. Also, just listening and restating what the client wants helps in securing the client’s trust.  Block (2011) suggests that the most important question to ask the client is “what do you want from me?”(p.76). Furthermore, it is also essential to know what support the client can provide. These questions help in knowing the client’s expectations from you and also help to inform client that their support is required for the successful completion of the project. According to Block, it is very essential to communicate to the client what you as a consultant expect and want from the client. Additionally, discussing with the client the next steps and making sure they agree to them is also important. These tips on contracting by Peter Block helped our team in communicating with the client successfully.

The attitudes project was a great learning experience. I was very anxious and nervous about the first meeting with the client and wondered about how things would go, but it all went well. This project helped in developing my skills on maintaining good client relationships as well as keeping the project on the right path. Indeed, the suggestions from the book “Flawless Consulting” seemed to make the interaction with the client flawless. I recommend this book to all and hope that everyone benefits from it as much as I did. 

UTA & NCH - By Chelsea Charron

I believe that you go to undergraduate school to become educated in a well-rounded, general sense. You learn to communicate and think analytically. You learn about a wide range of topics that might not apply directly to your future career, but give you a new point of view or point of reference. However, I believe you make the decision to go to graduate school because you want to be trained and prepped for a particular career. And UTA’s Masters program in Industrial/Organizational Psychology is doing just that…training future I/O Psychologists to be successful upon completion of the program.

While I am a first year student in the program, I am also working in an HR position at NCH Corporation. Although working while attending graduate school has been challenging, it has really put into perspective the differences between what research has shown to be the best practices and how things really work in the business world. The program at UTA does a fantastic job of bridging the gap between the classroom and the business world, which is critical for Masters students looking to enter the workforce as an I/O Psychologist. One of the ways the UTA I/O program does this is by encouraging students to work with real companies to assess and solve real issues. For example, last semester we were given an assignment to work with an organization on an employee attitudes project. We were to find a company willing to work with us, develop an attitude survey, disseminate the survey to employees, analyze the results, and give a presentation on the findings as well as propose ways to improve employee attitudes.

Although the research tells us things should be done a certain way, this project taught us that often times in the business world, things are not done in the best way possible. Restrictions such as time and money force I/O psychologists to either convince managers of the value of lengthy assessments or to find ways to alter the assessment to fit in line with the managers’ ideas. In my experience with this project, we had to find ways to alter valid assessments to make them shorter and more direct, all while maintaining their usefulness. This was quite challenging and even frustrating, but was a more valuable experience than any test on the subject could have been. We were given insight into how things really work in the world of I/O consultants, instead of just I/O researchers, and are now better prepared to take on a position as a consultant upon graduation.


Check out NCH on their website here: http://www.nch.com/
And on Wikipedia here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NCH_Corporation