Psychology and HR – new ideas for your HR development plan!

Are you stuck with where to develop your HR career next?

Wanting to stretch your HR knowledge further?

This might be the answer!

A few years ago when the HR Game Changer launched, I was working to bring together a whole lot of different disciplines and methodologies and deliver them to the HR world!

Positive psychology. Organisational psychology. Coaching. Organisational design. Customer Experience. Design Thinking. Agile.

Getting involved in all of these areas meant I met a lot of different people who were really interested in involving HR more in these areas too. And that’s when I met Kathryn Jackson.

Kathryn has a background in HR but works as an Executive Coach and Career Counsellor, runs her own business Career Balance and has written 2 books on Coaching and Careers. Kathryn was keen to bring some ideas about how psychology plays such a strong role in HR and how you might develop yourself further in this area.

Kathryn presented on this as part of the Elephant HR Business Partner Summit.

In HR we’re often making sure everyone has a Development Plan in place – but we forget about ourselves. Or we’re a bit stuck with what we can put in there. In her presentation Kathryn talked about building your psych competency in whatever area of HR is going to be your priority for the next 12 months.

If it’s recruitment and selection, then why not look at doing some development in:

• Industrial Organisational Pyschology
• Understanding motivation at work
• Learning about psychometrics
• Understanding neurolinguistics and how these impact

If your business needs better focus on performance & talent management, then why not look at doing some development in:

• Psychology of goal setting
• Organisational psychology
• Psychological contract
• Human learning theories
• Psychology of human behaviour

If you are going to be focusing on international HR, then why not look at doing some development in:

• Cultural diversity
• Cultural intelligence (CQ)
• Building team effectiveness and team dynamics
• Psychology of change to support overseas secondments

Kathryn also talked about some general psychology areas that you might want to spend time developing.

I know about 15 years into my HR career, my development planning got a bit stale. However I remembered that many years ago, I had really enjoyed my first year psychology and also found it was incredibly applicable to HR. So I did some study on positive psychology and actually ended up presenting at the Positive Psychology conference a couple of years later!

If you’re also wondering what development to do next, I hope Kathryn may inspire you to look into psychology. It was an excellent and thought provoking presentation and I wanted to thank Kathryn for sharing these ideas.

If you’d like to know more about what Kathryn does just visit www.careerbalance.co.nz

To find out more about Elephant’s HR conferences just click here!

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