Top Tips for Designing Assessment Centres Part 1 - Considering the 'Big Picture' Stuff
03/05/2011, Author: Maria Gardner
Here at Criterion I spend a substantial amount of my office-based time (i.e. when I’m not gallivanting up the M23 on my latest adventures in training delivery) designing assessment centres. This can be either advising clients on how to select exercises from our Odyssey range of off-the-shelf assessment and development centre exercises – or actually designing them.
Over the years I have realised that in either instance there are a couple of key questions that are worth taking the time to consider so that you can answer the question of ‘what do I need?’ And, here they are:
1. How many people do I need to assess and how often?
When choosing scenarios and exercises take a moment to consider what your short-term and long-term requirements are. It is possible for a particular set of exercises to meet a number of assessment requirements – minimising costs and need for repeated assessor training.
2. What messages do I want to communicate?
Consider what kind of experience you want your participants to have and how you want to portray your organisation, department and the role through the activities you use. Often exercise portfolios are designed to reflect a range of different business scenarios and levels of challenge and complexity so pick the one that works best for your situation.
3. What are my timescales and budget?
How soon you plan on running your event and what budget you have available will influence whether or not off-the-shelf or bespoke will be the best option. If working to tight deadlines then go for off-the-shelf as these exercises can be with you in a couple of days.
4. What do I need to measure?
When assessing your participants consider why you are running this event and what the key success criteria you want to measure are, such as your competency framework, values or leadership model. Also, ask any potential supplier how their competencies align with yours so you can evaluate the degree-of-fit.
5. Bespoke or off-the-shelf?
Based upon your answers to the previous questions you will be in a good place to evaluate whether a bespoke or off-the-shelf solution will suit you best.
Bespoke exercises are great for:
• Assessing specific success criteria, leadership models or competencies
• Directly matching with the key challenges of the role/s assessed
• Reflecting your organisation’s culture
• Differentiating you from your competitors
• Providing an engaging and memorable experience for participants
• Being cost effective for high-volume and ongoing assessment needs as there are no repeat costs
Off-the-shelf exercises are great for:
• Measuring the most frequently used competencies and key skills
• Being available at short notice
• Offering a wide range of business scenarios
• Providing exercises suitable for different levels of seniority
• Being a cost effective way of meeting short-term and/or low volume assessment needs
I hope you’ve found these tips useful on how to get started with designing your assessment centre. Look out for Part 2: Choosing your exercises.
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