Nowadays, young people in Switzerland grow up in an environment in which they need to live up to very high standards at work as well as in private life. A closer look behind the scenes and an open ear however show, that many young adults seem to be missing an important piece in the puzzle of life or get lost along the way. At school, they learn the peculiarities of hydrogen bonds, swot French verbs or use the Pythagorean phrase – framed in a curriculum that is fully scheduled to the minute. However, when it comes to important life decisions turning to school courses or textbooks is often not an option. Navigating through life and functioning in the real world thus becomes part of self-studying and the life lessons have to be learned the "hard way".

If you feel like you could use some guidance about your future, learn about important life lessons, communication, partnerships or stress management, Projekt Kompass might be the right thing for you! The workshop Projekt Kompass was developed to prepare young adults to start successfully in life and offers a "toolbox for the young life". The content includes a range of useful psychological knowledge and tools, which were not taught in school. Twelve free evening events provide twelve valuable lessons for the young life!

Motivated, young students between the age of 18 to ca. 25 of years, are warmly welcomed to join the workshop, which will be held in German.

If you are interested and want to know more about the specific events, feel free to visit the website:

www.projekt-kompass.ch

All the best and maybe see you soon in Baldegg (LU)!

Author: Samuel Felder 

Picture: pixnio.com

As psychology students, if we do not see ourselves working in the clinical context, we may often think that we have few “hard-skills” with which to convince employers to hire us. As this may not be entirely false, the blog team would like to share its experience concerning internships in economic psychology (e.g. “psychologie du travail”/ “arbeits- und organisationspsychologie”).

Often, psychologists that were hired in this context are required to better understand the needs of a given target group, as well as to use their good communication skills in order to gather this information. To meet this demand, diverse tools are used; such as workshops, dyadic interviews, focus groups, customer journeys and online surveys. Luckily, psychologists are often thought to excel at these things. They are therefore asked a lot to use these methods, as well as to analyze and interpret the data. Moreover, online surveys are used particularly often, which can be seen as quite satisfying given the numerous hours spent at courses like “test theory” and “questionnaire construction”.

Nonetheless, I’m not sure that each and every one of us has spent a lot of time in their studies training these other communication-related competences. That’s the first challenge: our colleagues – who often aren’t psychologists – do not exactly know what we did in our studies or what are our competences. So it might be challenging for them to develop an accurate idea of what tasks they can assign us to when we are not busy making interviews and online surveys.

In fact, in our studies, we have developed an understanding of diverse facts regarding human behaviour, like the importance of environmental influences in light of stable personality patterns, the interplay between genetic predispositions and environmental chances and challenges, the fact that human rationality is an illusion, the statistical tools to investigate these questions, and so on. But how can we use this knowledge in the professional context is a difficult question to answer.

I think that everyone finds his/her own way to answer this question, depending on his professional field of interest. Some of us might focus on human resources, recruiting and team development (using their diagnostic-related knowledge), while others will sharpen their competences in market research, consulting, user-centred design and human-computer interaction. Moreover, in daily business, as budgets are limited, we must compromise between the benefits of high-quality results and economy of resources. Therefore, when psychologists’ job is full-time and that they are not devoted to their costly field of interest (f. ex. interviews and workshops), they turn themselves to fields like project management, which is also interesting. All in all, we shall not underestimate the fact that most competences will have to be acquired during work – which is not bad given the fact that demands of the modern working world are ever-changing.

Photo: Pixabay.com