Assessment and Development Centres
Assessment Centres
We use a range of techniques to explore the breadth of an individual’s capabilities and skills, as well as gain insight into their potential for further moves within the business – and whether this is within a silo or general management potential.
As with our Executive Assessment approach we build our Assessment Centres on the three pillars of:
- Business Simulation, which tests real time ability to deal with challenging issues around commercial, market, strategic and people decisions
- In-depth interview to gain data on target competencies through a focus on last two to three years as well as main challenges, achievements and aspirations
- Psychometrics, where we will typically use a personality tool prior to an assessment centre to generate hypotheses for the interview and a verbal reasoning test to complement the numerical analyses that will have been tested as part of the Business Simulation
In addition, we can assess candidates against the Kiddy Model of Potential which provides an indication of the speed with which candidates may be able to realise their potential, as well as what this potential looks like, eg siloed, general manager, etc.
We partner with our clients in a number of ways on delivery – Kiddy assessors can deliver the full assessment centre we work in teams with client assessors or some clients deliver without ongoing support from Kiddy. Whichever route, we train senior line people to assess to the highest possible standards.
Cobham
Cobham, the leading defence and aerospace business, asked Kiddy to design and run assessment centres to benchmark their top 200 globally andfollow through with an 18 month development programme that included both individual and group development events and activities.
The Executive Team and the Board are now focused on getting to know the talent group and pushing them both in their current roles and with development assignments.
Development Centres
Our Development Centres are created and run with the same rigour as assessment centres. The way in which they differ from assessment centres is in the type and nature of briefing that participants get before attending and in the amount of feedback and development planning that takes place.
For some of our clients we run briefing sessions for participants to walk them through the development centre process, what they will experience, how they might feel at various stages of the process and what the key outputs will be for them.
In some of our development centres we provide feedback to participants after each exercise and inputs around various competencies. On others the feedback all happens after the assessment piece has finished.
On a development centre, participants receive ‘hot’ feedback before they leave and more detailed feedback and development planning takes place within a couple of weeks. We find that a two stage approach has most impact:
- One to one feedback and exploration of strengths and development areas with the development advisor
- A three way meeting in which the participant reviews the development centre outputs with the line manager, with the development advisor in attendance to provide support and guidance as necessary
Infineum
We designed a two and a half day development centre for Infineum, the leading petroleum additives manufacturer. After a challenging business simulation on the first day, participants receive brief feedback from the observers, as well as taking part in workshop activities with actors and receiving psychometric feedback.
'Kiddy's assessment for development centres provide a high impact development experience for our high potentials and invaluable information on their development needs.'
Lee Sprung, Global HR Policies Manager