Post-Conference Review | Division of Occupational Psychology (DOP) Annual Conference 2025 | cApStAn | London

Early March, my colleague Devasmita and I attended the British Psychological Society’s Division of Occupational Psychology Annual Conference 2025, which we refer to as the DOP Conference.

Why would we want to go there? Are we I/O psychologists? No, although we often interact with them, we are mainly linguists and translation technologists. Our work focuses on the interaction between linguistics and psychometrics and we look at the portability of constructs and at the linguistic features that drive the psychometric properties of the assessment and survey items.

So, we went to the DOP conference to learn about the latest trends in I/O psychology in general and measurement in particular. We also learned about how recent practices in making psychometric tests more inclusive, for example by looking at reasonable adjustments to cater for candidates at different points on the neurodiverse spectrum. Professor Nancy Doyle’s keynote — with moving video footage on the hurdles that two very different autistic candidates faced in the employment world — was inspirational that challenged current practices vehemently.

We learnt what problems arise from a widespread use of generative AI by people and organisations who do not understand its limitations. Dr Richard Landers’ keynote — with its amazing live demos — highlighted the responsibility of occupational psychologists in being on top of things and urged us to do a better job of learning how large language models work and how we can understand the way this affects the future of work.

There were many enlightening presentations and panels, and this was time well spent. We learnt about humour and how it can meet affiliative needs, help mitigate stress in certain situation, but also be aggressive or inappropriate.
We also connected with people and organisations we (love to) work with, such as Lumina Learning , OccPsyence and Delta , had lunch and dinner with peers, colleagues, friends and partners. Nothing beats in-person contact to help evolve working relationships into partnerships in which milestones are naturally associated with a collaborative effort.

~ in the words of our Co-Founder Steve Dept

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