Assessment Centers

When it comes to department promotions, the challenge for any agency is to ensure those who make the eligibility list are able to meet the varied demands of a supervisory or command position. A well-designed promotional process provides insight into a candidate’s performance on a variety of job dimensions. The traditional job knowledge exam may be coupled with one or more assessment, or work sample exercises designed to replicate actual job tasks.

Written job knowledge examinations are ideal for assessing a candidate’s base knowledge in a particular area, such as supervisory and management concepts. But other assessment vehicles may be added to the traditional written exam to make a good promotional testing process even better – and can be extremely effective at helping you gauge the gap between “knowing” and “doing.” A candidate for promotion to police sergeant may have a strong command of department policy, state statutes and local ordinances, but may not have the presence to handle a meeting with a community group whose members are frustrated by escalating crime in their neighborhood. Stanard & Associates offers several promotional assessment options that can help you identify those candidates who are ready for the next level of leadership in your agency.

Stanard & Associates works in tandem with your agency’s local experts to develop challenging, yet realistic scenarios – situations that your candidates should be prepared to handle. As part of exercise development, our consultants work with your agency to develop standardized evaluation guidelines for each part of the exercise. This way, all candidates are judged against a common standard that is based on how things should be handled in your agency. This is how we ensure local validity and reliable evaluations across candidates.