Assessment Tools

Most clients looking for direction in their careers should expect to budget at least 3-4 months and 12 sessions of coaching.  We start by discovering your preferred style of behavior and communication, what motivates you (i.e., what you value), and what your cognitive strengths are.  From there, we narrow down career options that satisfy these criteria and begin assignments of weekly due diligence, in which you look into the career paths, compare to your blueprint, and discuss with your coach.  And as always, you have at your fingertips the combined expertise of our entire coaching team.  (Read the Feroce Promise).
 

Some of the tools we can use in coaching include a sophisticated battery of assessments that you can take quickly in the privacy of your home or office; our Strategic Life Planning Handbook, and even the support and advice of our other clients, via our new coaching blog, The Bridge.

To know where you're going, you need to know where, and who, you are.  Who are you behaviorally, and in your communicating style?  What motivates you and what do you value?  It's a good bet that not knowing these two alone have led to most left turns in your career.  And what are your cognitive strengths, the ones you want to leverage most?

Feroce Coaching's experts can enhance the insights that arise from your coaching.  Each career assessment (you can take just one or all three) may be taken on-line, in the convenience and privacy of your home or office.  They take only 15 minutes each!

"I have to say that when I started these assessments I had no idea how they were going to gather information in a useful way, but now that I see the results, I’m floored. They’re just dead-on in so many ways.  I look forward to implementing them in our coaching.” -- B.D., Managing Partner, major law firm

 

"Some of the information in the report was new to me.  A lot of it was not new, in the sense that I knew that about myself, but when you see see it in black and white, and in context, where you can appreciate just how important something really is to you, how unignorable -- that's powerful, and priceless.  I learned or had my attention drawn back to things about myself that I just don't feel I can ignore any longer."  -- M.L., President of a successful real estate company

ASSESSMENTS and DEBRIEFINGS

TriMetrix Assessment and Report

   - DISC Behavioral and Communication Styles

   - Personal Interests, Attitudes, and Values

   - Personal Talent Skills Inventory - Cognitive Strengths and Weaknesses on Over 60 Dimensions of Human Aptitude

    - Assessment Versions

   - Debriefing with Certified Assessment Coach Merrilee Olson-Axtell

Powerful Assessments on a Shoe-String: 

   - "Now, Discover Your Strengths"

   - Martin Seligman's Authentic Happiness Tests

Career Coach Anne Angerman's Assessments (Highlands, Strong, Myers-Briggs)

TriMetrix Assessment and Report

They are highly-validated, statistically reliable instruments that produce a comprehensive, personalized report with information unique to your behavior in the work place.  The result is a 65-page Coaching Report chock-full of information.  You'll be able to use the information for a long time, in life, career, relationships, and more.  This is a rare test in that it evaluates behaviors AND motivators AND cognitive skills, and is consistently spot-on accurate.  (Most other assessments assess one or the other, maybe two if you're lucky.)  And it's very hard to find an assessment that comes with a personal briefing by a certified analyst. 

The three TriMetrix Assessments begin with the DISC:

DISC Success Insights™ - Behavioral and Communication Styles

The full coaching report includes the DISC assessment of observable behaviors, the most popular assessment in American businesses today.  TTI administers a DISC assessment every 10 seconds.  The DISC gives you priceless information on not only your preferred or natural behavioral and communication style but, critically, the adapted style you've been forcing yourself into.  The difference between your natural style and your adapted style is -- let us know if this sounds familiar -- stress, boredom, lack of fulfillment, resentment.

• General Characteristics - clients agree this section is at least 80-90% accurate, and often more.  "How do they get this stuff?  It's spot-on," is something we hear a lot.
• Your Personal Brand -- What is your value to an organization? - on one page you will find revealed the basis for your own personal brand - do your resume, cover letter, and elevator pitch reflect what truly makes you unique and valuable?  What you simply do better than anyone else?
• Checklist for Communicating - priceless information for knowing yourself well enough to deal with others, how to educate them on dealing with you, and gaining the self-awareness and emotional intelligence that makes leaders.  Equally valuable for personal relationships!
• Don't's on Communicating - What ten communication mistakes do others, such as peers, your employees, even your boss and loved ones (yes, your family and friends too), need to know about when communicating with you?
• Communications Tips - a handy one-page cheat sheet on how you can deal with specific types of people
• Ideal Environment - this is the template for your next career.  If a job description doesn't fit the characteristics of your ideal environment, think twice.
• Perceptions - how you and others see you; what your blind spots are
• Descriptors - what is your behavioral type?  Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, or Compliance?
• Natural vs. Adapted Style - In what ways are you not in alignment with your true self?  This shows you how you can get in alignment.
• Adapted Style (current behavior in relation to work)
• Keys to Motivating - What you need to know before you settle on a new livelihood (or even start looking), what to ask about in any interviews, and what your bosses need to know to keep you happy. 
• Keys to Managing
• Areas for Improvement - Do you know where you need to improve?
• Action Plan - This gives you and your career coach or relationship coach a plan for your future.
 

Personal Interests, Attitudes, and Values™

The PIAV offers an exhaustive inventory of what makes you tick:  what you like, what motivates you, what you don't like.  What are your values?  What do you consider important?  It's all here, and it's also quite accurate.

Personal Talent Skills Inventory™ - Cognitive Strengths and Weaknesses on Over 60 Dimensions of Human Aptitude

Over 50 years of scientific research has revealed that we have three dimensions of thinking about the world:  people, tasks, and systems.  These three dimensions are involved in every decision we make.  They are behind all of our strengths and weaknesses.  What are the strengths you should leverage?  What are the weaknesses you can improve upon, delegate, or minimize, as appropriate?  This assessment will tell you.

Assessment Versions

o Management – Staff Version
o Executive Version
o Sales Version
o Team Building
o Communicating with Style
o Customer Service Version
o Relationship Version
o Core Values:  Personal Interests, Attitudes & Values (esp. for career-changers)
 

Debriefing with Certified Assessment Coach Merrilee Olson-Axtell

And after you've had a chance to digest the Coaching Report, your primary coach will help you to arrange a riot of a three-way coaching call with the irrepressible Merrilee Olson-Axtell, our Certified Assessments Coach.  This is guaranteed fun.  Merrilee loves her work, and she loves people, and you can feel it! 

The Assessment Debriefing is a great value, because if we were to try to cover the same information in our coaching relationship, you’d not only lose the benefit of Merrilee’s expertise, but it would take 2 (45-minute) or 3 (30-minute) sessions to cover the same ground – at a higher cost.  So you’re definitely getting the most coaching bang for your buck here.

Group Rates:

Clients working in teams or organizations prefer to spend their time working on the discovery and resolution of issues that affect the group’s performance.  Assessments can assist these clients in the discovery phase, but they may not have the training, or the time to deliver these highly validated assessments themselves.  For such clients, we will administer the selected assessments and deliver a unique group debrief via webinar or tele-conference to the team.  We offer the following discounts for team development work:
5- 10 reports: 5%
11 – 15 reports: 10%
16 – 25 reports: 20%

To discuss which assessments will best serve your work with your clients, to place an order, or to take an online demonstration of the power of these products, contact us.

Powerful Assessments on a Shoe-String:  "Now, Discover Your Strengths"

A less costly, less detailed approach, powerful in its own way, is the book Now, Discover Your Strengths, with the accompanying online assessment (be sure to buy a new book!).  Because the price is so reasonable, we often have clients do these assessments in addition to any others.

One of Amazon.com's Best of 2001:  "Most original and potentially most revealing, however, is a Web-based interactive component that allows readers to complete a questionnaire developed by the Gallup Organization and instantly discover their own top-five inborn talents."
 

The Library Journal says:  "The premise of this new management study. . . is that the most effective method for motivating people is to build on their strengths rather than correcting their weaknesses.  The authors, researchers at the Gallup Organization, have analyzed results of interviews conducted by Gallup of over 1.7 million employees from 101 companies and representing 63 countries.  When asked, only 20 percent of these employees stated that they were using their strengths everyday.  So that they can take a test revealing their strengths, readers are given access to the StrengthsFinder web site and a special ID number; once they learn their profile, they can read the analysis in the book.  A description of each type is included, together with case studies, and managers are shown how to handle various types." 

Martin Seligman's Authentic Happiness Tests

Career Assessments.  Know who you are, how you prefer to work, what communication and behavioral style you prefer to use and be around, what your strengths are, and more.

Coach Anne Angerman's Assessments

Career Coach Anne Angerman uses a separate set of assessments, but their methodology and output are similar to those above.  Anne's include:

* The Highlands Ability Battery — Is the gold standard among assessment tools measuring individual abilities.  Abilities are hard-wired in each of us at birth and can be measured after the age of fourteen.  The Highlands gives you information on natural aptitudes, compatible work roles, artistic abilities, learning channels.  This is an objective assessment measures through timed work samples, what you are actually good at.  This assessment takes about 3½ hours to do online.
 

What will you get from taking the Highlands Ability Battery?

An understanding of your natural talents
Learning where you are most likely to be happy and successful
Using your true strengths more effectively and more consistently
Choosing the best option from a group of education/career/job/business choices
Finding a suitable educational program for college, grad school or returning to college at any age

"Taking advantage of The Highlands Program definitely gave me the focus I had been seeking for a long time.  Thank goodness for the way it was designed to give such specific feedback on a person’s gifts and styles of work."  JF - past participant
 

* Strong Interest Inventory®— This inventory takes about 30 minutes to complete and results in a 15-page computer generated report revealing career recommendations based solely on interests.  This is one of the most respected and widely used career planning instruments in the world.  It is based on the work of Dr. John Holland’s theory of career types.
 

* Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)®—This 30-minute self-report paper-and-pencil inventory is one of the most widely used personality instruments in the world today.  It's based on Carl Jung’s theory of psychological types.  By learning which of 16 personality types fits you, you can find a better fit for a career and work setting.