Assessment

It’s important to distinguish between an assessment and a test.

What is an Assessment?

In this site we are only dealing with personality assessment and psychometric assessment.

It’s true that people commonly refer to “personality test” but it’s far from accurate.

When something is a “test” it implies that there is a pass and a fail. It implies that there is a good result and a bad result. It implies that there is a right answer and a wrong answer.

When we are talking about a personality assessment, there are no right answers or wrong answers. There are no good or bad outcomes.

Your personality simply exists.

You Can’t Fail An Assessment

assessmentIn a world that finds value in testing school infants as young as 7 years old, it not surprising that our obsession with testing and scoring finds its way into personality assessment.

So it’s understandable that people have difficulty getting their head around the fact that they cannot fail a “personality test”. As soon as someone completes there questionnaire they often ask “Did I pass?” or “How did I do?”

The Biggest Misunderstanding About Personality Assessment

It is very common that people think they can change personality. They believe that they should test at the beginning of a development program and then test the individual again at the end. They believe what they should see is an improvement in personality.

This is not how personality works.

Personality is not something that needs to be improved. Personality simply exists. You were born with it. The objective is not to change your personality. If you try and go down this road, you will introduce stress and ultimately illness.

What we should strive to do with personality is understand it. We need to develop a deeper understanding of our own personality and also an understanding of the people we interact with.

A good personality assessment system should see high levels of consistency, which means that your report should look very similar no matter if you repeat it years after. Your personality doesn’t evolve with experience as you would expect with most other aspects of your life. However it can get bent out of shape.

We can find ourselves having to adapt to suit our job or our partner. However this does not change your personality, it merely sees you bent out of shape. Ideally you should strive to place yourself in an environment that doesn’t bend you out of shape.

So even if you have been bent out of shape for several years, if you were returned to an environment that didn’t require you to adapt, you would naturally return to your original preferred behaviour if allowed.

Why We Need A Personality Assessment

Unfortunately personality is complex. Few of us have a good grasp of our own personality and how it affects our everyday lives.

This is why we use personality assessments as they can help make sense of something as complex as human personality. Carl Jung did a lot of research into this area resulting in his book Psychological Types, published in 1921.

Jung believed that we are all unique, so with 6 billion people on the planet, you can see just how complex personality really is.

A personality assessment helps us understand personality. It makes it possible to get our heads around something so complex.

 

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