B2B Work Experience Placements for MSc Occupational Psychologists

As part of an on-going improvement process for conducting behavioural and collaboration assessments for the selection of supply-chain partners, during 2021 B2B provided work experience placements for three Liverpool University final year Occupational Psychology Masters students. Here is a blog on the experience of one of the students.

During my occupational psychology master’s studies, I was presented with an opportunity to complete a behavioural assessments internship with B2B. This was a great opportunity to put the psychological knowledge I learnt from my masters into practice at an occupational psychology consultancy.

During my internship, I worked on various projects focusing on exploring the most recent research surrounding behavioural assessments and standardised assessment procedures. During the projects, I had to conduct literature reviews to update the research database at B2B and use this to help inform the research-based practice. The three projects included the provision of reports in three areas:

• Emerging evidence on the validity and reliability of remote based occupational/behavioural assessments
• Testing the robustness of existing competency-based assessment criteria
• Review of the alignment of interview questions to test defined criteria.

This was a really great experience to see how the work that B2B does is based on the most recent research and is evaluated in terms of its validity and reliability.

Alongside my research-based projects, I was also given the opportunity to train as an assessor to understand how to assess behavioural and team-based assessments. This was the most memorable part of the internship as it allowed me to see the importance of fair assessment procedures and the importance of behavioural assessments to identify relevant skills and behaviours.

Completing an internship at B2B gave me an understanding of the work that occupational psychologists do and how valuable this is for organisations. I also learnt a lot about how to disseminate research findings and apply this to real client examples. Completing this experience whilst finishing my other University work also taught me some valuable time management skills which will be crucial in my future career.

Alongside the great supervision provided by John and Sharon, it was also great to work alongside other students. I would highly recommend current MSc students to consider an internship at B2B as I learnt a lot of valuable skills as well as gaining relevant experience that secured me a graduate role at the end of my studies. I would like to thank B2B for giving me this great opportunity!

Marianna