In the Spotlight on the mentoring stage:
Julie Simstich

As an industrial and organizational psychologist, Julie Simstich accompanies managers and their employees during challenging personnel and restructuring processes. She told us on the mentoring stage exactly what she is responsible for and what her path from studies to professional life has been like.

Mrs. Simstich, where do you work and what are you responsible for?

I am a Business partner at Wolfgang Eder corporate development. We work there mainly with executives and employees from various industries. industries. Primarily we offer executive development. Companies come to us companies come to us because they have noticed that things are not running optimally and they and they want to start developing their managers. My Wolfgang Eder is responsible for workshops and training sessions in this area. and trainings. I am responsible for the individual development plans responsible, which means, for example, 360-degree feedbacks, coaching or individual Stress management means.

Our second focus is organizational development. Here, for example, companies come to us, which have a:n new:n managing director:in and now not everything runs as expected. I then come in as an external consultant and do an organizational analysis by conducting individual interviews with the managers and employees to find out where things are going wrong and why. The goal is to present the managing director with a result that he can accept and implement.

On another topic, I am currently advising a large cultural provider that is struggling with a high decline in visitors:inside due to the pandemic. Here I am with the psychological glasses and try to find out what is happening there socially just and how it can succeed in bringing people back to the venues.

How was your path from studies to professional life?

I always wanted to go into science and was planning to do the PhD. I ended up getting a good job as a research assistant at TU Graz and was provided with a new laptop and everything. We did some really cool stuff there. But from my point of view, no one outside was interested. Michaela Höfer from the Research Team, whom I met in a course, told me at some point: "Julie, you don't belong in science, you belong in business. Through her, I then came to Wolfgang Eder Unternehmensentwicklung and started there as an assistant, which originally had little to do with my studies. However, because I studied parallel to my work, I saw my entire studies and also my coaching training through the lens of personnel and management development. Over the years, I have thus been able to integrate my knowledge from my studies into our corporate offering and help shape it.

How much were you able to take from your psychology studies into your current job?

Answer: Extremely much. Through my work as an assistant to Wolfgang Eder, I sat in every lecture with my "personnel development glasses" on. These glasses helped me a lot with the direction of my studies, because I could immediately incorporate content from the lecture on industrial psychology, for example, into my professional activities and make it available to managers.

Dear Ms. Simstich, thank you very much for the interview.