6. Assessment Center Results

The special assignment I took on 9/24 was one of the most challenging environments I have ever been in. Even though I have taken the ILIAD assessment center once before as a first-year BSE student, it was still incredibly difficult and stressful the second time around. It was modeled after the typical workday of a Vice President for college book sales for a publishing company. Assuming this role, I had to make a 3 minute presentation, a customer service meeting, and a CEO selection meeting.As if that weren't enough, I also had to answer a stack of time-sensitive emails throughout all my other assignments. Additionally, this mock workday required that I run all over the business school going to different rooms and getting lost along the way. Although the assessment was incredibly strenuous, once it was finished I realized that it was actually kind of fun to challenge myself in a business model way.

Before participating in the assessment center I filled out a self-assessment of my skills that were tested throughout my performance. It turns out I didn't know myself as well as I thought I did! This was a surprise because the same thing happened to me last year; however, my predictions were still a lot more realistic than mine were last year. Above is a picture of my 2014 results (on left) and 2015 results (on right) side by side. The highest gap in 2014 from my self assessment to my actual score was -67 for Organizing, but in 2015 the highest gap was only -44. Therefore I got more realistic at predicting my abilities, but still not spot-on. Overall my skill scores for this year were better than last year. I improved on every skill except teamwork, where I went from a score of 90 to a score of 67. The only reason I can think of this decrease is perhaps because my other score of Initiative increased drastically from a 28 to a 76, my initiative and will to take charge might have hindered my ability to collaborate with others and listen to their points of view. Initiative was my highest score, for which I underestimated by abilities by 11 points. This was one of my lower scores last year so I am happy to have improved by so much.

The skill I need to improve most on is communication, which I scored in the 37th percentile for. Communication is the main skill of the entire class of CPBE225, so I know that throughout the course I will receive tons of advice on how to develop this skill. I think that part of the reason for why I didn't do so well on communication is because I did not answer very many of the emails in my in-basket. I knew that I couldn't do everything to a high quality, so I just tried to focus more on my meetings and presentations, therefore saving the emails for last. This caused me to not solve as many problems as I should have, but also allowed me to score well on other activities, so it was a trade-off. What I can do to improve this is prioritize the things I need to do in order of most important to least important. This way, I can at least knock out the emails that are the most time-sensitive, and then save the easier ones for when I have more free time. The easier emails can also be finished while doing other activities, which will improve my multi-tasking skills.

In the second evaluation, my performance by activity said that my best performance was in the CEO selection meeting, for which I scored in the 77th percentile. I am not surprised that I did the best on this task because it was the one that I actually had the most fun on and felt like I assumed a real leadership position. I also prepared for this meeting beforehand by reading the resumes of each of the applicants and forming opinions ahead of time so that I had things to talk about with my peers right away. My worst performance was the 3-minute presentation, which I scored in the 32nd percentile. I think this is because I spent so much time on preparing for the other two meetings that I didn't put as much focus on the presentation. What I should have done was evenly distribute my time between tasks instead of doing well on the others and completely bombing the last one. I improved a lot on the in-basket score from last year, increasing from a score of 27 to 46.

The third section of my evaluation was a very detailed list of recorded activities and my performance on all of them. I noticed an overwhelming amount of evidence that suggested I didn't speak with confidence for the 3 minute presentation, but I found conflicting evidence saying I was a strong and confident speaker during the CEO selection meeting. It is interesting to me that I received totally different scores for the same behavior depending on the task. I think this is because when I am put on a spotlight and told to stand in front of people on my own, I start to panic and fear public speaking even though I shouldn't. When I am working in a group, however, I am able to communicate my ideas clearly and confidently, even at times assuming a leadership position. I need to get better at transitioning my confidence from group activities to solo activities, because if I just get over the initial fear I know that I will have the same amount of high success.

I created a chart to summarize my feedback and focus on my development. I feel like I'm ready to make changed because this is the first time I can actually see what I need to improve on paper. Before, I knew I had weaknesses but they weren't explicitly communicated to me so I tended to just banish them into my subconscious mind and pretend they weren't there. The ILIAD assessment results can't be ignored.