Richard Lanyon

Psychology and Business Meet

Guidelines for Utilizing a Skills Assessment

 

When an organization is ready to take steps for utilizing a skills assessment, implementers will want to address several considerations. 

The job analysis: 

1. The job analysis determines what particular skills are needed. This involves studying the particular job in detail, in order to determine the various behaviors that the employees have to go through. You may find that several different skills are needed. Ideally, a test (or more than one test) should have specific components to assess each skill.  
2. Select the test?  For a small company, the cost-effective approach will probably be to select a test or tests that are already available from commercial test publishers. Some professional help might be needed to find out what’s available and to compare their merits. 
3. Construct the test? For a large organization, it is sometimes feasible and preferable to spend the necessary time and effort to develop a test or tests that fit(s) the company’s needs exactly. 
4. How to construct a test. This can be done by specifying the exact behaviors that employees have to go through; and making sure that the items in the test or tests represent(s) that information. The goal is to make sure that the test represents exactly what you want to measure. 

The assessment development process: 

The following steps are the core of the assessment development process, either in trying out a ready-made test, developing preliminary items to be considered for the test, or validating the test after it is constructed.  

1. You ask the supervisor to designate those workers who are the best performers in the area for which you are to be selecting; and also designate those who are the poorest performers.  
2. You give the test to all of these relevant employees, and you compare the results of the two groups. Obviously, you are hoping the test results will show that the top performers score the highest, and the low performers the lowest. 
3. If you are developing your own test, you go over all the items one by one, and pick out those that show the biggest differences between the two extreme groups.  You then inspect these items that have “survived” in order to make sure that the reason for their survival is not some arbitrary factor such as employee age, or something to do with a particular work station.
4. By following these steps, you have determined whether the test (or at least, some of the items of the test) measures what you want it to measure and that it is working correctly for the right reasons. If it isn’t working correctly, then you will need to trouble-shoot your procedure and start over. 

You now have a test that is tailored to the particular skills needed for a position.  

This is why it is so important to do a job analysis. As an example, you may need someone to run a machine. You will be looking for someone with mechanical aptitude, but that might not be the only characteristic needed for the job. It could be an extremely boring job, so you will also need to find someone who has the ability to work productively without getting bored and losing his/her concentration—perhaps someone who is high on the personality trait of conscientiousness. 

So there is often a “gray area.” You often need to check both how one performs on a skills assessment and also how one performs on a personality assessment. It is perfectly clear that mechanical aptitude is a skill. No question about it, much like math is a skill. There is nothing about assessing pure mechanical skills or math skills that has anything to do with personality. 

But if you need someone with strong mechanical skills who is also conscientious, then you are entering that gray area. If you’re looking for someone who is conscientious, then you are talking about a personality trait, and you will need to include a personality assessment.  

Skills assessments help take the guesswork out of employment decisions. It’s important to understand first what skill sets you need, and how they can work in concert with personality assessments.

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