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Test drives

By Ian Florance (January 2008 Issue)
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Testing moves more like a glacier than a river; very slowly. There’s a reason for this. The more you use a test and the more data you gather, the more useful it will be. Change threatens subtle and sensitive people decisions.

But innovation is happening. As we enter 2008, what new testing issues are going to emerge to help – or hinder – the L&D professional?

There will be more testing of skills and abilities. Changes in educational qualifications mean it’s no longer clear what many of them mean. Does a degree in, say, history indicate the same intellectual skills now as it did 10 years ago? People will use more tests to find answers to these sorts of questions and design training. There are growing numbers of skills tests online (see http://www.previsor.com/) for a growing company in the area.

Most of these tests are online and many of them are adaptive – they’ll pose different questions which react to the kinds of answers the candidate has given, or which set different tests of equivalent difficulty to different individuals. SHL has been at the forefront of such tests (see http://www.shl.com/SHL/en-int/Products/Access_Ability/).

A related point is the consensus that new job entrants and new managers need to concentrate on their ‘soft skills’: decision-making, listening, empathy and emotional intelligence. So, we’ll find more assessment of these sorts of issues. The emotional intelligence questionnaire developed at London University is a new test of softer skills (see www.thomasinternational.net).

When we look at how teams operate and try to develop a better team or department culture, we, by and large, test individual personality and then use these individuals as pieces of a jigsaw. There are new instruments which come at the problem from the other end. They assess the team or corporate structure, see what its characteristics are and then look at individual people in the mix. This makes it easier to link staff and hard business issues. The website www.human-insight.com gives an unusual and evolving approach.

We often start L&D with a baseline measurement of the area we’re addressing. But measurement doesn’t have to be in the form of a test. Techniques such as artificial intelligence and data mining mean we can take a range of different information and search for patterns which predict success, problems or particular behaviours.

The most innovative company I’ve found this year is Active8 Intelligence which can analyse data and apply very sophisticated technological and statistical techniques to them (see www.a8i.co.uk to view what the future might look like). A more longstanding way of doing the same thing is bio data assessment, an area Pan Testing has pioneered in the USA and which may migrate here (see www.panpowered.com).

The linked issues of risk, values and business ethics are going to get increasingly important, as the ripples from Enron, Northern Rock and the TV phone-in scandals spread. Can you assess these aspects of human behaviour? Can you train someone to be ethical, to follow rules, to share corporate values or to treat risk-taking responsibly?

I expect there to be a lot of research in this area. At the moment, you could try looking at integrity testing of individuals as a starting point for any development work in these areas (http://www.thepsychometricscentre.co.uk/publications/Giotto.asp gives a good example).

Of course, the majority of testing will be in the standard areas I’ve dealt with in this column during 2007. But expect to see these, and other, areas develop during 2008.

Ian Florance is director of Only Connect and a consultant at the Psychometrics Centre, part of Cambridge University. He can be contacted on ian.florance@btinternet.com

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