The Corporate Matters Approach

In order to meet D & D Industrial Consultants' mission the firm needed to consider the changing ways in which psychological content and services are delivered to the corporate marketplace.

Advances in multimedia technology have made it possible to create training opportunities for distribution to larger employee bases than ever before at lower cost, without sacrificing the integrity or quality that is associated with live instruction. Our mission therefore included the active translation of training and consultation that had been delivered in person to electronic delivery platforms. In order to achieve this objective, we needed to develop our own production capabilities.

We formed Corporate Matters, Ltd. by combining our resources as content providers and consultation experts with those of Telequest, a multimedia production company. As an independent publishing firm, we possess the joint expertise to author and produce our psychological materials to our own professional standards and to customize work to individual client specifications. This capability allows us to push the envelope of traditional psychology and to explore new methods of practice that incorporate multiple presentation platforms in the delivery of content and consulting services.

Use of Technology

Successful psychological applications for industrial use today must be able to reach large numbers of workers in distributed locations and be available to companies with diverse training resources, budgets and environments. Technology holds the promise of meeting virtually any organizational training requirement. However, we demand of technology that it do more than only solve practical problems of time and space. We believe that technology well used has the potential to penetrate beyond the educational reach of what can be achieved using live instruction.

We have developed and tested a distance learning model for our training programs that incorporates interactive instruction with self-monitoring. Using a researched based, step-wise self-assessment in conjunction with trainer-led interactive instruction, the learner can compare his or her own responses to training tasks to those of the larger group and at the same time gain self-awareness through self-administered exercises and feedback. Developed in collaboration with university support, the training model is also a research tool that allows us to refine theory and assess efficacy of our programs. This model has been successfully applied to all content areas we target that define behavioral change as the training outcome (e.g., sexual harassment, change management, leadership).

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