9. Assessment Center Results

The Special U assessment that I took on 10/15 was one of the most challenging environments I have ever been in. It was modeled after the typical workday of a Vice President for college book sales for a publishing company. Assuming this role, I had to make a sales pitch, a speech, and participate in a group meeting to discuss hiring a new CEO. As if that wasn’t enough, I had to answer a stack of time-sensitive emails during my other assignments. Although the activity was strenuous, once it was finished I realized that it was actually kind of fun to challenge myself in a mock business model way.

Before participating in the assessment center I filled out a self-assessment of my skills that were tested throughout my performance. It turns out I didn’t know myself as well as I thought I did. This picture shows my first assessment center evaluation by skill dimension, many of which were way different than my predictions. Overall my skill scores were very low with the exception of teamwork, which I scored in the 90^th percentile. For all other skills I greatly overestimated myself. The skill I need to improve on the most is organizing, which I scored in the 23^rd percentile for. It’s upsetting to me that I’m not as organized as I think I am, because this was the skill I rated myself the highest for. I think my poor response rate to the in-basket had a lot to do with my low organization score. What I can do to improve this is prioritize the things I need to do in order of more important to least important.

In the second evaluation, my performance by activity said that my best performance was on the persuasive presentation, for which I scored in the 80^th percentile, and my worst performance was the in-basket for which I scored in the 27^th percentile. I think this is because I spent so much time on making my persuasive speech and sales pitch good that I didn’t put much importance on the in-basket. What I should have done was evenly distribute my time between tasks instead of doing well and completely bombing one of them. I am surprised that I didn’t do better on the CEO selection meeting because that was what I actually had the most fun on and felt like I assumed a leadership position.

The third section of my evaluation was a very detailed list of recorded activities and my performance on all of them. I noticed an overwhelming amount of evidence that suggested I didn’t follow directions well. I got a 0 on “time close to 3 minutes” and “monitors time remaining.” When I take this assessment again next year I will make sure to wear a watch as well as get straight to the point when making a presentation. This will cut down on time from talking about unimportant details.

The fourth and last section of my evaluation rated my performance in the in-basket activity. The main reason I did poorly was because I only attempted 2 out of the 7 memos required. On top of that, my work pace was remarkable low at the 18^th percentile. The next time I take this assessment I will prioritize these memos and work straight through them instead of sitting and thinking of a response. Sometimes keeping the pencil moving is a better strategy than over-planning.

I created a chart to summarize my feedback and focus on my development. I feel like I’m ready to make changes because this is the first time I can actually see what I need to improve on paper. Before, I knew I had weaknesses but they weren’t explicitly communicated to me so I tended to just banish them into my subconscious mind and pretend they weren’t there. The Special U assessment results can’t be ignored.

Last but not least, I chose one of my unknown problem areas to develop a comprehensive development plan. By following this, I will be an immensely better public speaker. In the end I’m glad I got to experience the Special U assessment because I wouldn’t have been able to come up with these strengths and weaknesses on my own. Although it gave me lower scores, it was probably better to go into the assessment blind rather than preparing for it, because this shows our true abilities without priming. Now we know what we truly need to work on for next time.