Creating a world first
Chandler Macleod set up CMyPeople to develop and distribute our online skills assessment system.
The innovative system is the result of our extensive experience in organisational psychology, years of research and thorough industry consultation. It's like nothing else currently available.
Government selection
In 2004, the Commonwealth Department of Employment and Workplace Relations (DEWR) appointed Chandler Macleod to develop an assessment solution to address the increasing skills shortage in Australia.
Our brief was to develop a system that:
- measured employability competencies
- met the specific needs of Australian businesses
- was affordable and easy to deploy.
And that's what we did.
We won DEWR's global tender due to our long history of pioneering organisational psychology in Australia. Since 1959 we've performed over half a million assessments in 20 countries. And in the last five years more than 100,000 of those assessments were conducted online.
Extensive research and industry consultation
We wanted to ensure the system represented the needs of industry - so we started from scratch.
We worked with the Business Council of Australia, the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry and 200 enterprises and employer groups across Australia to carry out our groundbreaking research.
Through this rigorous four-year development program, we identified the most effective way to combine measurements of ability, abstract, numerical and verbal reasoning with personal style, to accurately reflect a person in terms of their employability competencies, and how these compare to a wide range of job roles.
Measuring employability skills
The research identified eight major categories of employability skill, making up the original Employability Skills Framework. But we realised that to accurately measure and apply these competencies in the real world, we needed a more detailed and focused framework so we broke these 8 competencies down into 36 that were even more meaningful.
We then reinvestigated our new set of 36 competencies - with a selection of the organisations that participated in the original research - to ensure they were relevant, valid and measured what needed to be measured.
These employability skills are not only those that a candidate needs to gain employment, but also the skills they need to:
- progress within an organisation
- achieve their full potential
- and contribute successfully to their employer's strategic directions.
