Assessment and Development Centre

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WHAT ARE THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN ASSESSMENT CENTRES & DEVELOPMENT CENTRES ? The type of centre can vary between the traditional assessment centre used purely for selection to the more modern development centre which involves self-assessment and whose primary purpose is development. One might ask the question 'Why group assessment and development centres together if they have different purposes?' The answer to that question is threefold. Firstly, they both involve assessment and it is only the end use of the information obtained which is different i.e. one for selection and one for development; secondly, it is impossible to draw a line between assessment and development centres because all centres, be they for assessment or development naturally lie somewhere on a continuum somewhere between the two extremes; thirdly most assessment centres involve at least some development and most development centres involve at least some assessment. This means that it is very rare to find a centre devoted to pure assessment or pure development. The issue is further confused by the political considerations one must take into account when running such a centre; it is common practice for an assessment centre with internal candidates to be referred to as a development centre because of the negative implications associated with assessment. It is easier to think about assessment centres as being equally to do with selection and development because a degree of assessment goes on in both. Development centres grew out of a liberalisation of thinking about assessment centres and it is a historical quirk that while assessment centres were once used purely for selection and have evolved to have a more developmental flavour the language used to describe them has not. Another problem with using the assessment-development dichotomy is that at the very least it causes us to infer that little or no
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