Development and Assessment Centre
Overview
A well designed and executed Development or Assessment centre is an excellent method for producing an objective assessment of a persons’ knowledge, understanding and skills against required criteria. Although the outputs of the development and assessment centre are quite different, the processes to achieve the outputs are very similar.
The assessment centre will usually be run as part of a selection process to aid in the recruitment of an individual to a specified position. The output therefore is a measure, both relative and absolute, of the individuals competancies against the required role.
The Development Centre on the other hand, has the construction of Development Action Plans (DAPs) as its primary objective. These DAPs would be used as a means of bridging the gap between where the individual is at the moment with regards to their competancies and where you would like the individual to be in the future.
Like an interview however, it is important that other factors be taken into consideration in conjunction with the A/D centre such as previous performance. With a poorly designed A/D Centre the best that you can legitimately expect is that the process can contribute less than 20% to the decisions or overall output. A well designed and executed A/D Centre should give you an output that can reasonably contribute 60% - 90% towards your DAPs or selection process. The D/A Centre could even have interviews and written tests as part of the process in addition to the traditional behaviour and skills assessment activities e.g. role plays, tasks, presentations.
The development centre (typically 1-3 days duration) would give individuals an opportunity to exhibit a wide range of attributes including, communication (listening, presentation skills, influencing ability, assertion), analytical skills, negotiation, meeting skills, decision making, behaviours, problem solving, etc. In fact the competancies assessed can be designed, if required, in conjunction with our own team. This can often be a valuable additional resource for your internal HR specialists in designing competency frameworks for roles.
Where possible we prefer to use our own team of assessors due to consistency and objectivity, but are able to train your own team of assessors if you wish.
