The job: Work and political psychologist Jo Silvester, Cass Business School I'm a psychology professor at Cass Business School, specialising in organisational psychology­, which, as a discipline, is used to select and develop employees. As far as I know I am the first person to apply organisational psychology procedures to party politics. I started working with politicians in 2000, when I re­-designed the UK Conservative party candidate selection process to help attract more women and minority candidates. It is much harder to identify a potentially successful politician than you would expect. It's not about "creating" them so much as getting a better idea of what skills these roles require. I interviewed all different parts of the party and asked what characteristics people thought a good MP needed, before tailoring the selection process to make it more objective. Some people worried that we were trying to make "clones" and you would always have the same sort of people as politicians. I had to show that making sure individuals have certain qualities - resilience, communication skills, the ability to relate to people - does not mean everyone is going to be the same; you are still going to have quirky personalities. I've also worked with the Liberal Democrat party and politicians in Iceland. You might think that from studying successful political skills I could be an MP myself but my research has shown how difficult it is and there's no way I would do it.