Educational and Training Projects

Project Seminars
In the Human Resources and Business Psychology graduate course, the knowledge gained in the undergraduate course is deepened. Project seminars with external cooperating partners are held on a regular basis for topics such as staff selection and teamwork. During these project seminars, a realistic insight into a practitioner’s everyday working life is given and human resource problems are outlined by the cooperating partners. Seminar participants are then to use the knowledge they previously gained and apply it to the problem at hand to generate possible solutions.

An example for this is the graduate seminar “Staff Selection: Recruiting and Assessment”, in which a company or an institution joins the seminar participants to describes the details of their staff selection process and to then give the students a task related to said process. This task is to develop a staffing strategy for a certain work position or working area. During the seminar, participating students may now apply their newly gained knowledge to the practice task to generate different plans of action. This may include everything from a job demands analysis, concepts for HR marketing, recruiting of new staff, exemplary selection and construction of aptitude tests (interviews, tests, assessment centre etc.) to onboarding. At the end of the semester, students get a realistic feedback regarding the practicality and quality of the conceptualisations.

Theses
Some field questions are well suited to be worked on in a thesis at undergraduate or graduate level. Together with the cooperating partner outside the university, we discuss the possible framework of the thesis prior to the student’s commencement of the thesis. Important discussion points are the time frame (completing a thesis often takes at least half a year), the requirements according to the respective examination regulations and the publication of the results.
One of the BFO and the Chair of Business and Organisational Psychology aims is to make the findings of research works accessible to the general public by publicising them. Therefore, findings of undergraduate, graduate and PhD theses in the field of business and organisational psychology should be publishable in form of articles in scientific magazines, book chapters or conference contributions. Of course, any findings will be published in accordance with the conduct rules of academic psychology, and therefore in a way that does not allow drawing conclusions regarding the individuals or working units involved. The name of the external cooperating partner will also not be mentioned in the publication, unless explicitly requested by said partner.