Assessment Centre and Development Centre
Impact work with our clients to design, develop and deliver both successful Assessment Centres and Development Centres. We believe that both processes can provide a vital function in identifying your talent pipeline at different points of an employee’s career in your organisation whether that is recruitment, selection, promotion or development.
Our definition and differentiators
There are many similar elements to Assessment Centres and Development Centres. However we find it helpful to distinguish between the two as follows:
An Assessment Centre is best used as a process to discover talent, select new employees or identify promotion-ready candidates amongst current employees.
A Development Centre looks to transform your talent, identifying potential and establishing individual objectives relating to development needs.
Assessment Centre
Impact can work with you to create an Assessment Centre event that will include a series of exercises that mirror the likely situations and challenges that will be faced by the successful candidate. Impact adopts a themed approach to engage the candidates and make the experience more realistic. Assessors observe, record and then rank participants. The process is robust, but with a practical approach that keeps things simple and focuses on your priorities:
- Ensuring long-term cultural fit
- Ensuring behavioural competence.
We can work with you during the following stages:
- Application and screening
- Telephone interview
- Online psychometric testing
- Assessment Centre
- Feedback
- Development Event.
Development Centre
In our Development Centre the emphasis is different; participants are part of the learning process and all responses to situations are handled in a spirit of personal and professional improvement. During a variety of exercises, observers will observe, record, classify and evaluate. However, they do this in a coaching style and provide feedback throughout the event to help participants build a picture of capability along with ideas for maintaining and/or improving in identified areas.
In this way there are no surprises at the end of the event; participants have acquired a portfolio of insights, feedback and ideas and may have already had the opportunity to work on key areas during the event.
Impact advocates using a combination of methods in a Development Centre, to ensure that each participant has equal opportunities for insight and learning. Depending on group size this invariably means that the process can last between 24-48 hours and may be residential. This adds a valuable networking dimension to underpin the professional development focus of each Centre.
More Information
If you are interested in Assessment Centres and Development Centres, you may also want to read about our approach to Talent Management and Development and Employee Engagement.
