Assessment and Development Centres

“I was quite nervous about how I was going to carry my department through our imminent major expansion, but the development workshop helped me see how we could prepare every individual for it.” – Middle manager, pharmaceutical company

Significant skill shortages are a reality for many organisations.

Recruitment and retention are key issues not only for HR professionals but also for line managers and those whose professional success depends on the professional competence of others.

Management Futures is skilled at helping you ensure you hire the right people, and support existing staff through effective training and by ensuring they have the skills they need to carry out their roles effectively.

Assessment Centres

Assessment centres provide an environment in which you can ensure that you hire the best candidates for a particular job.

Using a combination of appropriate psychometric instruments and practical exercises designed to replicate the way in which a person would do the job, they offer a far deeper insight into the suitability of a candidate than can be gleaned from a conventional interview alone.

Assessment criteria are based on carefully developed competencies – that is, the behaviours to be observed in someone doing the job very well.

Most centres run for half a day or a full day, on a one-to-one basis. For example, if there were 24 candidates for a job, we might run four half-day centres over two consecutive days with six assessors and six candidates.

A full report is written on each candidate for the interviewing panel so that they are armed with observable facts about the candidate rather than subjective personal impressions.

We strongly recommend that candidates are debriefed on their performance shortly after attending the assessment centre.

Development Workshops

Development workshops are about ensuring existing staff have the training and skills they need to function effectively. They are an exciting and innovative approach to:

• managing the human resources component of organisational change
• identifying the potential and development needs of your key people
• developing corporate and departmental training plans

They run over one, two or three days and can either be targeted at key skills critical for the immediate development of your organisation or the complete development needs of your management team.

What they deliver to the organisation

Development workshops offer a robust basis for developing the human resources component of business plans. They deliver:

• an audit of current management capability
• an audit of future potential
• a process for aligning people with the skill set for the future
• a robust basis for developing training plans
• a focused approach to allocating training budgets

What they deliver to the individual

Development workshops will:

• put the responsibility for development with the individual
• make the employee feel valued within the organisation
• provide an individual and targeted personal development plan
• leave the individual committed to a realistic action plan

How they run

We begin by developing or updating a comprehensive set of management competencies with you which will underpin the design of the workshop and provide the measures against which participants will be assessed.

We will help you prepare participants in advance of the workshops so they get the best out of the experience.

The workshops are intensive and stretching and run on a model of activity, self-assessment and structured feedback.

Each participant will leave with a comprehensive personal development plan. The organisation will receive a detailed summary report highlighting the key issues and development needs identified in the workshop and recommending a priority action list.