KSA Ltd. Assessment Center Training
How NOT to get Promoted with an Assessment Center Process!*
Read This First Before You Consider Registering For an Assessment Center Course! Just pass the class information on to your competition, as you’ll be working for them soon enough!
- Listen to everyone who tells you “Don’t worry about the Assessment Center. Just be “yourself!”
- Find someone who will tell you exactly what the last assessment scenarios were, since they always use the same ones!
- Better yet, just wait till the first participants come out of the assessment center process and ask them what the scenarios were before your turn! After all, who will know?
- Don’t read anything on assessment centers, but read all you can about your policies and procedures.
- Study for hours and hours for months ahead of your assessment center by reading your departmental manuals and policies until your eyes bleed!
- Don’t read your job description for the new rank – just sell yourself as how good you are at what you do now.
- Don’t practice strengthening your core supervisory and management skills EVERYDAY as “free practice” using daily scenarios, in-baskets, presentations, briefings, initiating projects, etc.
- Rely on your years of experience, and winning personality.
- If your department won’t pay for you to go to any training prior to your promotion, such as a supervisory/management course or a course like ours that focus on assessment centers, do not pay for a course yourself.
- Do NOT attend ANY promotional preparation courses that aren’t POST or “Certified” by your state certification agency. They know what courses are best for you so stick to their menu courses.
- Do NOT read any professional journals or magazines that would have articles on supervision or management in public safety.
- Only attend conferences that are exciting, and involve either firing weapons, looking at cool stuff, or hearing lectures about safety/survival and advanced technical skills
- Don’t take any supervisory or management skill-building courses – stick with what’s worked for you so far.
- Wait until the last minute just before the assessment center dates are announced and quickly watch a video on assessment centers
- Ignore your departments annual reports, long range plans, budgets, and future needs – you won’t need to know about them anyway
- Do not memorize your department’s mission, values, goals and objectives. Those are just trick questions.
- Don’t worry about the challenges the department will be in 3-5 years; most likely you’ll still be where you are now.
- Wait until after you are promoted to go to Supervisory or Mid-Management training; obviously if your agency wanted you to know anything about Supervision or Management they would have trained you before you got promoted, not afterwards!
- *I hope you realize this was a “tongue in cheek” list.
However, if you are a more “serious” candidate, you may want to dig a little deeper into what assessment centers or practical exams are and why they are used for public safety promotionals. The most obvious difference with assessment centers is that they measure core skills by what you say, do or write during simulated scenarios, not by what you’ve memorized or read for studying for a more traditional pencil and paper test.
It’s up to you ultimately. After all, it’s YOUR career. All you have to do now is REGISTER! RM /KSA Ltd. http://assessmentcenter.org
KSA Ltd. Knowledge, Skills and Abilities
Rick Michelson, Director
Helping Prepare Tomorrow’s Public Safety Leaders Today!
Since 1990
888-732-2173 assessmentcenterinfo@gmail.com