Psychology Students Partner with Regional Food Bank to Conduct Job Analyses, Offer Recommendations

By Erin Frick

ALBANY, N.Y. (May 13, 2025) — Every workplace, even those with high efficiency and happy employees, will eventually encounter a personnel challenge. An employee leaves and their coworkers have to pick up the slack. A new hire starts, but their onboarding skips a fundamental skill. A new manager comes in with fresh ideas that bump up against existing processes. If left unaddressed, these issues can degrade workplace efficacy and morale. This is where industrial-organizational (I-O) psychology can help. 

“The field of industrial-organizational psychology applies psychological principles to workplace settings, focusing on enhancing employee well-being and organizational effectiveness,” said University at Albany’s Wei Yang Sim, a fifth-year PhD student. “By understanding workplace dynamics, I-O psychology can help organizations solve practical problems by, for example, clarifying job descriptions, improving communication with employees and recommending trainings. The field aims to support employees, and help organizations operate smoothly and make fair, informed, personnel decisions.”

Associate Professor of Psychology Dev Dalal leads a year-long practicum course that connects graduate students in UAlbany’s  industrial-organizational psychology program with community organizations. The students effectively act as consultants — conducting scientific assessments and relating their recommendations — to help solve real challenges within the organization. 

In Fall 2024, Dalal forged a new collaboration with the Regional Food Bank —the Albany-based nonprofit that works with over 1,000 charitable agencies to feed 350,000 people across 23 counties in New York State every month. Over the course of the project, the practicum students worked closely with the Regional Food Bank’s Organizational Development Manager Joel Hernandez, who is also a sixth-year PhD candidate in UAlbany’s the I-O psychology program.

Hernandez explained that the Food Bank’s CEO Thomas Nardacci had been exploring ways to address certain challenges that can make it difficult for his employees to do their jobs efficiently. After learning that UAlbany has a strong I-O psychology program with a practicum course full of graduate students willing to lend a hand, the makings of a fruitful collaboration were evident. Nardacci reached out to Dalal to form a plan.

“The first project that the I-O psychology practicum course helped us with was to run job analyses on our positions in the distribution center,” Hernandez said. “The students were very interested in the work we do and took time out of their day to meet with our staff, enjoy their presence and help. They did an amazing job gathering data and are currently in the process of sending over their final write-ups, which will help us update our job descriptions. We look forward to continuing and deepening this partnership for many years to come.”

What Do People Do All Day?

When it comes to maximizing employee happiness and effectiveness, this is the critical first question. Throughout the fall 2024 semester, Dalal’s 10 practicum students conducted a comprehensive job analysis for five roles within the Regional Food Bank. They worked in pairs, each duo focused on a specific role within the organization. 

“The purpose of a job analysis is to ensure that the job description matches the actual work being performed,” said practicum participant and second-year master’s student Chloe Hanson. “This kind of analysis can identify potential mismatches between written responsibilities and real tasks — information that can be used to clarify job descriptions and ensure that they align with the work that employees are being asked to do, and how the job is officially described. 

“Ultimately, a job analysis can help organizations make decisions that shape their employees’ activities and wellbeing. This could include things like redistributing responsibilities, removing or adding tasks to job descriptions, recommending trainings, or suggesting new operating procedures designed to help employees.”

Learning with Community Impact

The project started with a tour of the Regional Food Bank facility, where the students met the employees that they would get to know over the semester. During the data collection period, the students shadowed employees on the job, interviewed employees about their roles, developed a survey to assess job responsibilities and required skills, and conducted a review of archival job descriptions, which they compared against current ones. Each team prepared a final report with their findings and recommendations. 

“My goal in establishing this partnership was to create an opportunity for the practicum students to learn how we can use I-O psychology and our skills as scientist-practitioners to help an important community organization and impact not only the lives and well-being of its employees, but also the people who these employees serve,” said Dalal. 

“In this first year, the practicum teams were able to provide the food bank with valuable information for their workforce planning, while at the same time, gaining valuable experiences working with an organization with an incredibly important and valuable mission. My hope is that this project is the first of many collaborations between students in the practicum course and the Regional Food Bank.”

“This was my first time conducting a job analysis,” said Hanson. “Working on a project with a real organization, not just as a hypothetical assignment, reinforced the need to be creative, flexible, and open to discovering unexpected insights.”

“In I-O psychology, it’s important to approach each project with a ‘blank slate’ mentality, and not necessarily take an initial problem statement at face value,” said Sim. “You have to look at problems from multiple perspectives because the problem might not be what you think it is. Our role is to cater to the needs of the organization, while bringing an open, malleable mind to the challenge at hand."