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Career Guidance
At Acerta we understand that your investment in human capital yields an optimal return if employees can develop personal talents in a supportive business environment. In this context, it is not only important to focus on competences, but also to pay the necessary attention to an employee’s ambitions and personality.
Performance reviews, appraisals and daily interaction with your employee are useful indicators in this regard. If an employee’s ambitions are not in line with the expectations you have for this employee, he or she is likely to underperform. By not using an employee’s talent to its full potential, he or she may no longer regard the current position as a challenge. Or perhaps employees may wonder what the impact of an acquisition, reorganisation or reorientation of business activities will be on their careers. In today’s competitive labour market, employee retention is one of your main concerns. Employability is a key value of your business. Acerta offers Career Guidance services to help optimise your organisation’s human capital.
Detailed analysis of personality, ambitions and competences
Acerta offers customised career advice based on detailed analysis. Employees are screened in a career-development centre, where they participate in interviews, tests, surveys and simulations that provide us with an insight into their personality, ambitions, competences and learning capacity. The career development centre consists of two parts. A set of general assessment tools is the foundation of the first part. In the second part, customised analysis instruments − geared to your employee’s profile and situation − are used.
Part 1: General assessment
To gain insight in the employee’s personality, a number of tools and methods can be applied, e.g. the Occupational Personality Questionnaire (OPQ), the Quotation List for Expressions Free Self-Description (Vrije ZelfbeschrijvingsMethode) or the MBTI ®-method (Myers Briggs Type Indicator). Acerta consultants are accredited to apply the MBTI-method and use it in individual coaching situations. The main objective is to provide your employee with a better perception of his or her own personality. This helps employees to understand their own behaviour and successfully adjust it to accommodate the situation. This is important for the development of personal, relational and managerial effectiveness.
To gain insight into the employee’s learning capacity, an analysis of biographical data and the results of computerised tests provide practical information on the various types of learning capacity. Two examples are analytic numeric or verbal deductive learning capacity.
To gain insight into the employee’s motives and ambitions, we use Edgar H. Schein’s nine career anchors. Your employee’s main motives are identified based on the results of a highly user-friendly questionnaire. Additionally, we use a multiple-choice career survey. Positive and negative career experiences are further discussed during an interview. Extra surveys on career choice and career values can provide further, in-depth information. This helps you to determine which professional context is most ‘suitable’ for an employee and what the decisive factors in making a career choice (creativity, social commitment, etc.).
The analysis methods for general assessment depend on the employee’s personal situation. An unhappy employee who is not entirely sure what direction to take, requires different analysis tools than a highly motivated staff member who has short-term promotion prospects.
Part 2: Specific assessment
Based on the Part 1 results, a customised screening programme is set up to check for competences that are in line with the employee’s personality, learning capacity and interests. The most important tools used during this stage of the assessment process are:
- Computerised tests that provide insight into organisational capacity, administrative skills, specialist knowledge, etc.
- Simulations and role-plays to monitor employee behaviour in relevant work situations. Some examples: Leadership role plays indicate which leadership style comes most naturally to a participant; in-tray exercises test the employee’s managerial competences; presentation tests are useful for positions that require candidates to regularly speak in public and do not only test didactic competences but also analytic insight; commercial tests are used to assess employees who aspire to a sales job.
- Behaviour-based interviews to gauge competences, behaviour and experience; and to determine how employees would tackle specific challenges.
The results of the full career development centre process are incorporated in a well-prepared report. The employee’s strengths and development potential are outlined in a detailed competence overview. We discuss the report with both the employee and the HR manager, who usually requests the report. It is also an extremely useful tool for drawing up a personal development plan. You can find more information on this in the section Personal Development Plan.
Acerta consultants also use these results to look for ‘suitable’ functions that link in with the employee’s profile and ambitions.
You can also rely on Acerta to coach an employee to further develop skills or adapt to a new work environment.
