When a company announces record results, brings out a successful product or becomes number one in its market, it is usually the senior executives who receive the plaudits.

Often, however, there is someone else who has made an essential contribution apart from the workforce — the psychologist. When companies undergo significant change or introduce new technologies, when they need to make sure that they hire the right talent, want to motivate staff or have to deal with other work-related issues, they turn to the organisational psychologist for advice.

For graduates interested in becoming a professional occupational psychologist, the route to chartered status is a long one, but an accredited MSc in occupational psychology is an important step along the way.

“What we are interested in is how people behave at work,” says Kate Mackenzie Davey, head of the department of organisational psychology at Birkbeck College at the University of London.

“Because we are accredited by the British Psychological Society, we have to cover eight areas: organisational change; selection and assessment; training and development; careers counselling; wellbeing at work; motivation and performance; performance appraisal; and technology at work.”

Birkbeck has the only specialist organisational psychology department of its kind in the UK and a long-standing reputation in the subject. Students study nine taught modules and undertake a project involving empirical work in an organisation. The programme is delivered part time, either via evening classes or a network blended learning approach, both online and through workshops.

An organisational psychology MSc covers issues that will resonate with many people, and which are at the heart of a productive workforce, such as changing patterns of work — choosing to work part time, for example — shifting boundaries of organisations, the challenges of middle managers and employee motivation.

“In the new technology module, for example, we look at how people respond when a new technology is introduced,” Davey says. “The idea is to actually talk to the people who are going to use it about what they want and how they can use it.”

At Manchester Business School, the MSc in organisational psychology also covers issues that people encounter in their everyday working lives.

“Take organisational change, for example,” says Sandra Fielden, head of the programme at Manchester. “We look at how change is handled and at different types of change, such as mergers and acquisitions.

So we take students through what that change means in terms of its impact on people, how people respond to change and how you manage the process so that people buy into change, as opposed to resisting it.”