Before you select an assessment for your upcoming training program, make sure you ask yourself the following important questions. Answering these questions will give you more direction so you can choose the best assessment for your group, AND get the most out of your budget! 

1.  What is my goal? Why is it important?

Okay, this is technically two questions, but they go hand in hand. While some organizations may think they know what their goal is, further questioning shows that they haven’t thought about WHY that goal is important to them. Be specific with your goals.

Our goal: For our sales team to get to know each other better.

Let’s dig a little bit deeper. Why does your sales team need to know each other better? Are they having trouble getting along? Have you just hired a lot of new team members? What is the desired outcome of your team knowing more about each other?

The more specific your goal, the easier it is to determine what exactly you’re looking for. Answering these questions now may also help you sell the idea to higher-ups when the time comes.

2.  What skills do I want to assess?

It’s important to determine what skill sets you want to assess throughout your training. For example, if you’re trying to reach the goal mentioned in #1, you will want to determine what skills would be essential for your group to achieve that goal. You would probably determine that communication and team building would be important skills to focus on.

To help get you started, here’s a list of commonly assessed skills important to any workplace:

• Communication
• Leadership
• Management
• Sales
• Team Building
• Time Management

3.  Live Training or Brief Meeting?

While participants will learn a lot about themselves by reviewing their results, some organizations choose to take it a step further by organizing a follow up to review the results with them. You may choose to conduct a half day training, one-on-one sessions or a quick 30-minute review during an already scheduled team meeting. Determine what will work best for your group and schedule.

4.  Online or Paper?

Paper profiles are a good fit for organizations that are watching their budget and/or have employees or clients with limited access to computers. Paper profiles are self-scoring, meaning participants need to manually summarize, plot and analyze their results.

While the paper profiles provide guidance specific to the participants’ results,
online assessments are generally more in depth. Since online profiles are automatically generated, you can have participants complete the profile ahead of time so that you don’t have to spend valuable in class time on profile completion and scoring.

Depending on the publisher, online profiles may offer even more features. If you’re working with a group, you’ll also want to make sure you can get a summary of your group’s profile, often called a “group report”. If you’re concerned about one-to-one relationships, then look for the ability to generate “comparison reports”. Finally, if you plan on doing multiple groups, look for administrative functions, like Inscape’s EPIC account that will give you 24-hour access to all of your assessments, even allowing you to customize the reports with your branding.

5.  How much can we spend?

Of course, budget is important! However, try to be as realistic as possible with your budget. Assessments are an inexpensive and effective way to provide personalized feedback and improve your overall group’s performance. Just remember that you’ll need an assessment for each participant and that assessments can’t be shared or reused.