Katie Elder , PhD
Founder and Lead Consultant
Katie started her professional journey when she pursued a degree in Industrial-Organizational Psychology and became a consultant to companies looking to improve their hiring, onboarding, training, team dynamics, management, or leadership. Essentially, anything that has to do with the ‘people part’ of an organization. She has over 15 years of experience and has consulted with Fortune 100 companies in the tech and banking industries, government agencies, and small businesses.
Four years ago, she undertook a new adventure with her husband. They purchased and renovated her grandfather’s barn for their own wedding and create a wedding venue–
Overlook Barn –to rent out to others. In those four short years, she has built a thriving wedding business that hosts over 60 weddings a year and has been recognized by Martha Stewart, The Venue Report, Southern Living, and others as a top wedding venue.
With People Part Consulting, Katie merges two of her life passions–management consulting with wedding industry and small business professionals.
Katie earned her PhD in Industrial/Organizational Psychology from George Mason University and holds a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology with a minor in Statistics from North Carolina State University. She has presented dozens of times at professional conferences, has publications in peer-reviewed journals, taught college courses as an adjunct professor, and even has a book chapter in The SAGE Encyclopedia of Industrial and Organizational Psychology, 2nd edition.
How did we decide to name ourselves People Part Consulting?
It all started at happy hours, holiday get-togethers, and random encounters at the park when acquaintances would ask Katie what she did. She would create an instant hard-stop to any conversation by saying she was an Industrial-Organizational Psychologist, or IO Psychologist ‘for short.’ The field of IO Psychology isn’t exactly well known and most people think of psychoanalysis or therapy when you say you’re a psychologist of any sort. So, Katie found herself saying she studied and practiced ‘the people part of organizations’– anything to do with hiring, motivating, leading, or organizing people within a company.