(905) 760-0111 OR (877) 680-0200

It’s always exciting when a new resource crosses my desk; I am the first person here that gets to try it out and I get to let everyone know what I think of it.  Maybe I get too excited by assessments, but it’s who I am, and I’m not about to change any time soon.  The Workplace Excellence Inventory or WEI is the latest from JIST Career Solutions; they’re the ones that created some of our most popular assessments like the Barriers to Employment Success Inventory (BESI), the Career Exploration Inventory (CEI), and the RIASEC Inventory. This Career Management assessment helps your clients identify their essential skill areas for workplace and career success.  It identifies proficiency in six competencies: Critical Thinking, Work Ethic, Career Management, Soft Skills, Leadership, and Teamwork.

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Like other assessments from JIST Career Solutions, the Workplace Excellence Inventory is a self-discovery assessment that helps clients organize things they already know about themselves in a useable format.  There are no trick questions, bubbles to shade in, or complicated scoring procedures.  Your clients just read each of the statements, and circle a 1, 2, or 3 determining if it is not descriptive, somewhat descriptive, or very descriptive of them. As long as they answer honestly, the results give them a good picture of their strengths and weaknesses in each of the six competencies.  Scoring is just a matter of adding up those circled 1s, 2s, and 3s and placing the totals in boxes in the right side of the page.  Each of the competencies is colour coded, and visually separate to help with scoring.

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From there, your clients open up the assessment, record their scores in the chart, and rank them as low, average, or high.  The next step is where they get to discover what the different competencies actually mean, and read examples of what they look like in the workplace.  Within each competency are lists of conversation starters/journal prompts that can be used for further developing each of the competencies, and creating a success plan.  These conversation starters are great in a group setting as clients can discuss in pairs of small groups each of these concepts, and later debrief with the whole group.

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The final step, on the back of the assessment asks clients to think about, and write down the specific skills they want to develop, the goals to attain these skills, and actions/strategies to achieve them.  This step can be done at the same time as the rest of the assessment, or assigned as “homework” since some people need more time to reflect on new information.

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One of the things I really like about resources from JIST Career Solutions is that they come with additional free resources. The Workplace Excellence Inventory (WEI), has a manual in pdf that can be downloaded and printed off… if you prefer thumbing through pages like me.  It includes information on the history and development, along with the reliability and validity studies… remember I told you to look for these things!  It also has information on how to administer, score and interpret the results of the assessment.

It took me about 15 minutes to take and score the assessment, not including the success plan.  This is a great assessment for both youth and adults in career counselling, vocational rehab, and outplacement programs.  The results can be reviews over time, and your clients success plan can be updated as they take steps to increase their skills in each of the competencies.

If you think this assessment is a good fit for your clients, and you want to see one for yourself, I have a limited number of sample copies available for preview.  Give me a call at 1-877-680-0200 or email me bwhitehorn@clsr.ca.  I, of course, will want to hear your thoughts about it.

BradBrad Whitehorn, BA is the Sales & Marketing Coordinator at Career/LifeSkills Resources Inc.  He was thrown in to the career development field headfirst after completing a Communications degree in 2005, and hasn’t looked back!  Since then, Brad has worked on the development, implementation and certification for various career and personality assessments (including Personality Dimensions®), making sure that Career Development Practitioners get the right tools to best serve their clients.