The Challenge:
The London Ambulance Service (LAS) has a long-term workforce plan to increase frontline staff numbers by a fifth, to more than 3,000 by 2010 in order to build its capacity to reach and maintain performance targets to meet the requirements of healthcare for London. This has inevitably led to an increase in recruitment and assessment activity across a wide range of roles and levels within the Service. This increase, along with its ambitions to become one of the country’s first Foundation Trust ambulance services, has led the LAS to review its assessment activities to ensure they remain robust, consistent, aligned with organisational objectives, and most importantly, in line with best practice. The number of different assessment practices across the LAS made this a particularly challenging project. Honing the skills of both HR and non-HR staff across LAS to reflect current assessment standards and consistency was recognised as a key priority for the service.
LAS was an existing user of A&DC’s range of off-the-shelf Assessment Centre Exercises (AC-EXS) and approached A&DC to work in partnership with them to produce a cost-effective solution to their needs.
Solution:
In scoping conversations with LAS, it was agreed that an initial solution would include four key stages, outlined below:
- Stage 1: Identify core issues in current assessment practice through interviews and focus groups to be reported back to LAS
- Stage 2: Produce a set of standardised Best-Practice Guidelines for designing and conducting Assessment Centres
- Stage3: Based on the findings from Stage 1, design and deliver a series of Assessor Skills training programmes for experienced and non-experienced Assessors within LAS
- Stage 4: Evaluate the impact of this training on assessor practice within the Trust and equip key LAS staff with the skills to run assessment centres and train others
Stage 1 involved interviewing a range of LAS staff, from HR personnel to Operations’ managers. The objective of this initial diagnostic phase was to understand what current assessment processes were in place across the LAS, as well as what key stakeholders felt needed to be improved based on their assessment experiences. This provided A&DC with a comprehensive set of data that could be incorporated into the design of bespoke Assessor Skills training courses to make them more relevant to the LAS and the organisation’s culture, context and procedures. For example, ‘off-the-shelf’ A&DC assessment exercises were tailored for use during the training to accommodate LAS competencies. This created familiar terminology and behavioural examples for the delegates, as well as identifying how they could improve both the quality of feedback provided to candidates and underpin existing LAS practice with modern assessment research and standards.
Stage 2 required A&DC to produce a series of standardised “How-To” Guides for both non-HR recruiting managers and HR personnel. These provided explicit, step-by-step instructions for designing and conducting an assessment process. Such readily-available, easy to follow documents are a useful resource for all staff with a recruiting remit, as they allow the user to consult relevant sections as and when appropriate in order to inform their approach.
Stage 3 focused on the main requirement of the LAS. This was to up-skill internal LAS capability in best-practice assessment methods. By training all recruiting personnel to effectively assess in accordance to best-practice, a more standardised, rigorous, fair and legally defensible set of assessment methods have been implemented; increasing both the accuracy and relevance of the selection decisions made within LAS. Additionally, feedback training has allowed assessors to provide more effective feedback to candidates.
Stage 4 is about measuring the effectiveness of the assessor training on assessor perceived practice, as well as increasing the internal resource capability of the LAS. Effectiveness will be measured in two ways; one in terms of assessing each of the assessors reaction to the training and how valuable it has been in increasing their confidence and competence and the second in establishing some return on investment (ROI) criteria
Outcome:
Initial feedback from the courses and project as a whole has been very positive. LAS staff have expressed an increased confidence and competence in their skills. As a way of supporting the LAS’s continuing effectiveness and efficiency, A&DC are now developing a Train the Trainer course, giving LAS the capability to train further assessors as required.
The LAS will be conducting an analysis of the effectiveness of the learning using the totem measuring methodology, while A&DC will work jointly with the LAS on an evaluation study to demonstrate both improved assessor performance and that this initiative has been a worthy investment of public funds.
“The LAS has been committed to assessment centres for some time and this was an opportunity to review what we did and how we did it. The initial scoping analysis confirmed that there was already a high level of competency amongst our existing assessors but through A&DC’s expertise, our assessors can now better link modern theory and approaches to our regular way of doing assessments. As one of the delegates expressed:” it’s been good to learn what it all means and knowing what I have been doing in the past meets recognised good practice”
Nick Nixon, Manager Learning and Organisational Development
London Ambulance Service NHS trust
July 2009
