Assessors: Creating the Best Chance of Success

Getting buy-in from your assessors, even having the right people in place in the first place, and then giving them the right assessor training and support are all essential for the success of your competency management system or assessment process.

In our experience, the important areas to focus on to have the best chance of success are as follows:

Consider Who Should Be Your Assessors

We know that this is not always an option, but if possible, think carefully about who your assessors are, and in particular ask:

• Are they committed to the role?
• Do they understand what is involved?
• Will they complete the training and any follow-up work?
• Do they have the right technical competence?
• Do they have the right soft skills and attitude to handle assessments?
• Will they be able to have the right conversations, including the difficult conversations, in an effective way?
• Will they be able to overcome bias?

Plan How to Get Buy-in from Your Assessors

Sometimes this is not a problem but often getting buy-in can be difficult because your assessors will probably have busy jobs already before they take on this additional role.

Assessors are also more motivated when they understand the process, the current drivers behind this and that management will back them up.

You therefore need to make sure that you are giving them sufficient support from the start and that you maintain that support over the longer term. 

To do this, you can:

• Put the right training in place at the start
• Provide the right support and guidance early on
• Ensure planning for assessment can be part of the day to day job
• Check the assessment process is balanced between the assessor and the person being assessed
• Ensure that your processes and paperwork is straightforward and not overburdened
• Manage workloads, expectations and timeframes
• Try to ensure that you have buy-in before you sign-up the assessors

Implement Effective Assessor Training

In our experience, often assessment processes or competency management systems go wrong because of the assessor training.  In addition, there is often no verifier training which adds to the problem.

Assessor training should be focused on your organisation’s assessment process and paperwork.

The key features of your assessor training can be summarised as below:

If you are using assessor qualifications, make sure that your assessment process and paperwork does not get lost in the training and qualification assessment process.   

There are ways to do this but if it is not done well, assessors can leave confused about what they have to do to achieve the qualification and what they have to do going forward within their organisation’s competency management system or assessment process.

Please Get in Touch if you would like to find out more or would like to discuss how we can help you with any aspects of assessor training and qualification or assessor troubleshooting.