Career Assessment Tools

If you have followed the Olympics the last few years you will have noticed a country far away with a limited amount of people winning lots of medals (no, not Canada). Australia came 4th in the world 17 Gold, 16 Silver, 16 Bronze. The US was number 1, and Canada came in 1 medal above Turkey (I am not joking!)

This was a huge improvement over the 1992 Olympic games where Australia came 11th in the medal standings, US was second, Canada was 12th and Turkey was 24th. Needless to say Australia is doing something much better in its Olympic program and has the results to prove it.

What are they doing you ask? Well, one key factor is that kids take an athletic assessment test that recommends which sports they play. Other factors include financial support of the athletes and the infrastructure that was built for the Sydney Olympics. Australia has a number of sport scientists who have developed a comprehensive testing system that can put you through 30 tests and compare the results to those of peers and elite athletes. This database will then produce a report that produces ranks of sports, and even positions-cool!

The key here is that it is a comprehensive process and there is lots of data to support the results. My experience is there are a lot of good tools but very few great career assessment tools. The benefit is the ability of the process to be used as an objective benchmarking element to help make wiser decisions sooner. In our process we have tools that help pinpoint the right careers and positions but tools are just one part of the road to success. It is the coaching that takes the tools and produces real results.

G'day mate I'm off to a barbie...