What is Psychological Testing?
Psychological Testing is a method of determining someone’s capabilities in a number of different ways and areas. The purpose of such testing is to see into what role that person would best be placed, to identify typical conflict areas that can then be discussed with that person to enable them to better understand and overcome them, and to learn what future improvements can be trained upon to enhance existing skills and add to them. In this way, that person can take a more involved and understanding approach to improving their activities, their skills and their results – to the benefit of the individual and the organisation
What do Psychological Tests involve?
There are many different Psychological Tests that have been developed for these purposes. Most use a series of questions in a multiple choice format – often over 100 questions in total. The questions usually address specific aspects of the individual’s thinking process and mindset – usually any one question deals with only one such aspect. As the questions are in randomised order and are similar in type to the others, the individual does not automatically know which question relates to which aspect being tested – which helps to keep the process more objective.
A key point is that there are no wrong answers. The questions usually result in a series of scores across a range of different parameters (with each parameter being a different aspect of personality or role type). These scores, whether high or low in their own right or with respect to the scores on other aspect types, are all equally valid. What this means is that just because one score is lower than another does not mean that that person is better, or worse, than someone else who scored differently – it just means that they are different.
Once the scores have been determined, the usual approach is for the moderator/consultant running the examination to run through the potential meanings before the people taking the tests know their own results. This allows a greater understanding of how the tests have been created, why, what they mean in broad brush terms and how the determination of the finer details can be made. The next step is for each individual to get feedback on their own test results together with indications of what the results mean, how they can be interpreted, and why the individual can be happy with the results (and everyone can be).
The overarching interest for the organisation is then to use these results in the Team Building exercises to allow interaction between role types and to mix role types to try to get a balance of each type in each team.
How can Psychological Testing be used?
Apart from Team Building, the results from Psychological Testing help in conflict resolution (helping each side see things from the others’ point of view so they better understand why the conflict arose in the first place), allowing focus on training and development of an individual to better enhance their capabilities (and subsequent morale), and also to allow the organisation to better plan its future recruitment strategies and so forth.
How do you find out more about Psychological Testing?
Please feel free to Contact Us so that you can discuss the activities, training, impact and uses in more detail and with specific relationship to the situations you are dealing with.
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