Most often, assessment centres are referred to as tools used to evaluate an individual's suitability for specific job roles and functions. It typically comprises aptitude tests, culture fit and personality profiling, case study simulations, psychometric assessments, written reports, interviews, and others, which predict candidates' potential and performance before joining an organisation. On the other hand, development centres typically focus on organisational initiatives such as high-potential identification, training needs analysis, succession planning, objective employee personality reviews, etc.  

While assessment and development centres are familiar terminologies in most organisations for their critical role in recruiting and selecting the best talent, proactive organisations now leverage a combination of assessment and development centres to predict future behaviours, make better talent management decisions and accelerate career paths across the organisation, even for existing employees. 

As a business leader, how well do you leverage assessment and development centres across each stage of the employee life cycle? Is an assessment and development centre your go-to resource when evaluating performance and determining the best talent for advancement, acceleration, and promotion? What proven tools and techniques do you use to identify your employees' management potential?

Performance reviews and intuition may work well at certain levels, but when you need to accelerate career paths significantly, choose between closely tied candidates or promote people into critical and high-value roles, it is best to rely on proven methodologies to test and determine if the shortlisted internal candidates can demonstrate the skills and abilities needed to move up the ranks.

An Assessment and Development centre uses assessment tools and methodologies to give holistic insights into your employee's overall performance potential, making the process consistently justifiable as a strategy for promotions and advancements. In addition, you can partner with a top recruitment and assessment agency, like Workforce Group, to create and deploy assessment methodologies needed to objectively evaluate the specific competencies for a particular role or experience level on your organisation's need and context. 

Assessment and development centres help companies in: 

1. High-potential identification: Deploying the right assessment tools helps organisations identify employees who can take on additional responsibilities and drive business goals. Assessment and development centres stretch employees and assess critical competencies while ensuring objective evaluations. 
2. Leadership development: Leveraging an assessment centre before embarking on leadership development programmes helps businesses test the leadership competencies relevant to their specific industry, context, and organisation. Assessment centres evaluate a leader's ability to command the respect of their peers, respond to change, think critically, develop their direct reports, innovate, negotiate, and influence, among others.  
3. Training-needs identification: Deploying the right assessment centre provides concrete data on improvement areas across an organisation. Business leaders can leverage this data to focus and prioritise the use of their learning budget in line with their organisation's core competencies. 
4. Succession planning: Beyond identifying talent that can assume higher responsibilities, business leaders need to simulate these next-level challenges and ascertain if these candidates in their succession pipeline can realistically handle the challenges offered by the next higher position. The right assessment and development centre also acts as a catalyst for change and helps talent become aware of the mindsets and skills needed to get to the next level and lead effectively. 

What are some of the features that make up an Assessment and Development Centre? 

The Assessment Centre consists of certain core features that ensure its validity. They include:

• Job Analysis – A comprehensive job analysis captures certain behaviours essential for the target position. 
• Classification of behaviours to be measured – Several methods help identify the essential behaviours fundamental for a target position. These measures are used as benchmarks when assessing the employee. 
• Multiple Assessment Exercises - Different assessment tools are used to measure different competencies. It is crucial to carefully design and deploy the right assessment tools and techniques. Examples of assessment exercises include in-tray exercises, presentations, psychometric tests, interviews etc. 
• Simulations – On-the-job simulations representing ideal situations the employee will face in the target position. 
• Individual report on the employee. 

Business leaders need to deploy the right mix of each feature to ensure a valid and predictive assessment and development centre.

When it comes to methods that can be used to evaluate your employees' promotional or career progress needs, four Assessment and Development methods listed below come to mind. They can be blended to give a robust evaluation of your employees.

Promotion Assessments

Employers' reliance on employees' past performance, promotion interviews or tests don't provide objective ways to determine their fit when conducting promotions or career advancement tests. 

For a highly effective promotion assessment, business leaders need to design and deploy assessment tools centred on job analysis, leadership dimensions, and organisational values. These promotion assessments help measure the potential of a person to perform satisfactorily on a level that differs significantly from their current strengths.

Product Knowledge Test 

Employers can also deploy a product knowledge test to check how much employees know about the product and services of the organisation. Product knowledge tests also ensure that all employees have a shared understanding of the company's products and services and can identify potential prospects who may need the product and services of the organisation as they take on more senior positions. As a result, it is easier to identify employees who can drive shared goals and make optimal business decisions to promote product understanding. 

Employers need to audit and ensure that all employees equip themselves with proper knowledge of the product and services of your organisation. Doing so will ensure that they can efficiently align the benefits of the organisation's products to the needs of their customers, make the best decision and understand the big picture.

Employee Competency Audit 

Employee competency audits focus on specific behavioural characteristics and attributes that result in effective individual performance. This focuses on personal traits not directly tied to work and achievement.

Employee Competency Audit is a criterion-referenced process because it assesses your employees against pre-determined benchmarks – such as those expressed in your organisation's competency model. These audits quantify the size of skill gaps to ensure your employees can truly define the organisation's strengths and the opportunities to pursue when placed in higher positions. 

Personality Profiling 

Personality profiling provides unique insight into your employee's personality traits, leadership style and behavioural tendencies, and how they fit into the target position. There are different models for personality profiling depending on the behavioural characteristics needed for success.

Profiling your employees can also help you understand how their personalities can enable or derail their performance and identify areas where they may need to develop new habits and culture or modify their behaviour. 

Personality profiling can also provide enhanced reports that focus on psychological aspects of the employee, like people management style and even working from home preferences. It also helps employers to determine the right mental health interventions that will resonate with different people across the organisation.

How We Can Help You

Without a doubt, assessment and development centres are critical to an organisation's success and should be integrated across the employee life cycle. You can also find out more on how to leverage assessment methods for effective hiring here.