SELF-ASSESSMENT VERSUS THIRD-PARTY ASSESSMENT

When applying competency assessment, it is important to consider how it will be performed in a practical context. There are two main ways in which competency can be applied: self-assessment or third-party assessment.

Self-assessment is concerned with an individual carrying out the competency assessment on themselves, whereas third-party assessment has the assessment carried out by someone other than the individual. There are many pros and cons associated with each approach and this will be discussed by considering a number of issues.

The first issue is that of rigour. One of the biggest problems with self-assessment is that people who are less competent tend to have a higher opinion of themselves than people who know what they are doing – discussed in Chapter 1. To a certain extent, this can be addressed by having a well-defined process in place that can be used for both self-assessment and third-party assessment, but there is still the element of trust involved in the individual. It is always possible that an unscrupulous individual will either fake their own results or exaggerate their own claims to competence. With third-party assessment, the rigour is more assured than with self-assessment as the element of an individual being able to exaggerate their own abilities is removed. Of course, what this actually comes down to is the competence of the individual to carry out the assessment and, theoretically, if an individual was competent to perform competency assessments, then the result should be the same. However, it is unreasonable to expect every person to be fully trained and qualified to assess competency.

The second issues are ones of time and cost. At the end of the day, competency assessments take a not insignificant amount of time and resource. Some of the time and effort estimates for assessments will be discussed in the next chapter, but even for a simple assessment of, for example, six competencies at three levels, the estimate is in the region of two assessors for three hours to carry out an assessment. This may not seem like much for a single assessment, but consider the situation for carrying out 20, 50 or even 100 assessments. The numbers now seem to look quite daunting. Clearly, self-assessment comes into its own for multiple assessments as it is not really feasible to carry out large numbers of third-party assessments without incurring massive expenses. Therefore, when it comes to time and cost, then self-assessment is clearly the way forward.

The next issue is that of training the assessor. This has been touched on previously, but it really must be stressed that the competence of the assessor is key to successful assessments. In an ideal world, all people who would perform self-assessments should be trained to perform them effectively, but the issues of time and cost arise again. Clearly, it would cost a lot less to train up a few people for third-party assessment, or even to rely on third-party assessment from another organisation, hence incurring no training costs. Again, however, the issues of time and cost for these assessments must be borne in mind.

A more practical approach to assessing large numbers of people is a combination of self-assessment and third-party assessment. For example, consider the situation where 100 people need to be assessed. One pragmatic approach would be to get everyone to carry out a self-assessment and then to take a small sample, say 10, to be assessed by a third party. In this way, the people who do the self-assessments would always know that there is a chance that they will be selected to be fully assessed by a third party, which should keep people’s exaggerations down to a minimum. In terms of training, it is feasible to provide a reduced, high-level training scheme for self-assessment in the form or process guides and seminars that can be applied to large numbers of people and provide them with just enough knowledge to carry out self-assessments. Of course, this should not be confused with having people who can carry out third-party assessments.