Previous Page:
COMPASS CAPABILITIES

Compass Capabilities enables rapid and reliable assessment

Why is Assessment so Important?
Staff Capabilities have to be assessed to provide a proper basis for recruitment, selection, training requirements, staff reviews, counselling, career planning and succession planning.

But why is assessment of Person Capabilities so important? Won't our current methods of accreditation do just as well? Well, it depends on the sort of business you are in and the diversity of skill sets employed. Here are some practical considerations.

Some Practical Hurdles
There are a number of practical hurdles that must be over-come for assessments to become a reality. Many HR professionals subscribe to the notion that the only way to deal with these issues to set up and control an Assessment Centre. While this is a laudable addition to some enterprises, it is not a practical solution for smaller organizations, or those with a vast variety of skills and expertise requirements, or where it is geographically widely dispersed.

• Position Descriptions not Compatible with Assessments A real stumbling block in HR practices is that the way job or position descriptions are specified, is not aligned with what can practically be assessed in real life. What the HR professional can do, however, is assess some of the Capabilities a person has [for instance, their knowledge in a particular area, their arithmetic acuity, their clerical accuracy, and so on].

  Compass Capabilities takes whatever Person Capabilities can actually be assessed, captures them using a variety of appropriate interfaces and turns them into PerCaps that are meaningful [for selection, performance management, planning, etc] indicating the degree of certainty or confidence which can be attributed to them.

• Uneven Levels of Assessable Person Capabilities Another issue is that where ever assessments can actually be done, they tend not to fall at the same conceptual level of abstraction. For example, expertise in dental surgery is a far cry [but not unrelated] from just having steady hands or good eye sight. Without an automated calculation, it is impractical to determine real ability, so HR professionals have tended to resort to intuition, guesstimates and trial and error techniques.

  Although these elements occur at different levels in the Caps-Tree, Compass Capabilities gaps and best fit functions are designed to deal with that imbalance. They actually use the imbedded Caps-Tree to calculate and infer exactly what Capabilities the person possesses or is likely to possess.

• Wide Variety of PerCaps Types Person Capabilities come in all flavours: Attitudes, Skills, Knowledge, Expertise, Experience, Understanding, Abilities, Competencies, Qualifications, Accreditations, Licenses, Certificates, Diplomas, Degrees, Attributes, Behaviours, Characteristics, and so on. The assessment of different types of Person Capabilities usually need to be performed by different people in different parts of the organization, and often at different locations. This often results in the assessments not being conducted properly [if done at all]. Reliability of the captured results is a serious question, one which diminishes the value of assessments when it comes to staff reviews. Staff tend to know when assessments are valid and when the assertions of managers or counsellors are not well founded. It is rare for an organization to have sufficient recorded assessment results to be able to form [convincingly] the basis of performance awards, staff selection, training requirements, and career path planning.

  Assessment Centres and traditional assessment methods tend not to cope very well with conducting field [or on the job] assessments and there is often little integration between the assessment roles of the Assessment Centre and line supervisory management and little collation of actual assessment results from both sources and little aggregation of the two data sets [if they are actually captured and stored].

• Fair Go for Workers
  One of the biggest [and longest existing] complaints of staff is that they do not have much control over their job opportunities [other than to vote with their feet and look elsewhere for their personal development and a better job]. Even unions do not argue for specific career paths or staff development. That's because, to date, there has not been an effective means of trapping the Person Capabilities of the enterprise and being able to articulate that collective body of skills sets in a succinct and robust manner. Compass Capabilities changes that and overcomes the impasse forever.

• Lack of Precision and Refinement
  Where is your business heading? The more an industry is undergoing change or competition, the more refined [less gross] and more precise assessments need to be [for the enterprise to be able to respond to such change].
  
  When you know what Person Capabilities the organization has within it, you are much more able to determine where you can go [in a given period of time] and then map out a plan of how you are going to get there. If you do not have methods of assessing Person Capabilities and a system for capturing such assessment data, there is little real chance of effecting any sort of meaningful change in the workforce skills set [you can try, but you are still using blunt tools]. Many business strategists rely heavily on [even resort to] mergers and acquisitions rather than any meaningful organizational development programs.

Compass Capabilities system can help here:
The question is: how can assessments be performed and captured quickly and reliably?

• Staff can record their own view of their abilities.
• Line managers and supervisors can enter daily, weekly or project performance records.
• Trainers can record exam and quiz results.
• HR professionals can record test results.
• Recruitment agencies and trained psychologists can record their interview observations.
• Progressively, each party can refine [and collaborate / discuss] their information until there is common consensus or organization view of the Capabilities of the staff member.

0027

LINKS