Assessment Center Methods

The assessment center is a methodology used to select, promote, and develop people, usually managers, in an organization. From the earliest efforts in the 1930s and 1940s in the military, aimed at selecting officers and key operatives for highly sensitive missions, to the first systematic application in the organizational setting in the 1950s, the assessment center has become a familiar tool for skills evaluation.

A defining feature of the assessment center methodology is that it comprises a battery of tests. Further, the tests must represent a multiplicity of types. No single instrument or single type of instrument is sufficient to qualify a skills assessment process as an assessment center, by that name, according to the International Task Force on Assessment Center Guidelines.