CIOP 2018 Consulting Challenge – Call for Sponsoring Organization

Purpose

The Chicago Industrial/Organizational Psychologists (CIOP) consulting challenge is a competition for end-of-2nd year graduate students to create a solution for a real-world organizational problem. Graduate students nationwide inboth I/O MA and PhD graduate programs sign up for the challenge and will be assigned to teams. These teams will all be given the request for proposal (RFP) from the host organization on the same day. Theteams have 2 days to create a solution with deliverables in both a written and presentation format. Judges, consisting of the host organizations’ subject matter experts (SMEs), area consultants, and academics will choose which team has presented the best solution to the organization’s RFP.

New this year is linking this event with the SIOP conference in Chicago. The event will need to be held on April 16-18th. This date is chosen to be at the Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday before the conference begins to have the greatest draw for graduate student participants.

Benefits of Participation

The CIOP consulting challenge will have many benefits for graduate students, seasoned professionals, and host organizations in the Chicagoland area. Graduate students will get real-world experience with helping an area organization manage their people-related concerns using tools and applications from the I/O realm. Seasoned professionals can serve as judge to these teams and may gain a few innovative ideas. The local host organization will gain access to the best talent the graduate programs have to offer with innovative ideas to address their own personalized situation. Plus, the organization gains exposure as a great place to work for I/O psychologists, good will for providing support to the local professional organization (CIOP), and exposure at colleges and universities with programs in I/O Psychology.

Needs from the Host Organization

To ensure a fair process for all graduate students participating in the consulting challenge, the host organization will be keptconfidential until the RFP is presented to the teams. This is to prevent students from doing advance research on the host organization and potentially giving an “edge” to these industrious students.

The host organization would need to provide the following to ensure success:

  • The corporate location for the student presentations. This should only be needed for one day.We will need to secure catering for that day; at least lunch and the cost of this can be covered by the registration fee from the graduate students.
  • The case (request for proposal) based on a real life issue the organization has now or had previously experienced. This need should be I/O relevant but the interpretation of what is I/O relevant is vague on purpose so we can be creative.
  • Provide some SME judges for the student presentations that are connected to the functions most relevant to the RFP.
  • A contact person (I/O friendly) to serve as coordinator with our CIOP contact to answer RFP related questions student teams may have, etc.
  • The willingness to interview winning team members for an internship as this will be presented as an incentive to the winners of the consulting challenge. If internships are not available, CIOP could offer a cash prize to winners instead.

Want to Participate?

If you would like to participate, the next steps would be to let us know! We could work together to create an event that will be part of the history of CIOP. Also, I would be happy to answer any questions you may have as we create the next CIOP consulting challenge, so please feel free to contact me at or by phone at 312-341-2285.