ABSTRACT

Developing student competence relevant to real-world practice has been a persistent challenge in tertiary education. Organisational psychologists use assessment centres in industry to measure job-relevant competencies of employees or job-candidates to facilitate accurate recruitment or development decisions. Despite its potential as an innovative approach to developing student employability, this methodology remains novel in higher education. To stimulate wider usage and consideration, the steps and success criteria associated with a long-standing developmental assessment centre programme for postgraduate organisational psychology students are explained and demonstrated. The programme’s benefits have extended beyond delivering a quality assessment solution to providing a contemporary strategy to strengthen industry partnerships, thus ensuring sustainability and circumventing common criticisms of assessment centres being resource intensive. Although contextualised in the setting presented, this case highlights the assessment centre approach and practice implications for academics, particularly given that partnerships, and student competency and employability are important responsibilities for all university departments.

摘要

培养与现实世界实践相关的学生能力一直是高等教育中的一项持久挑战。组织心理学家使用行业中的评估中心来衡量员工或求职者与工作相关的能力，以促进准确的招聘或发展决策。尽管它具有作为一种创新方法来发展学生就业能力的潜力，但这种方法在高等教育中仍然是新颖的。为了激发更广泛的使用和考虑，解释和演示了与长期发展评估中心计划相关的步骤和成功标准，该计划针对研究生组织心理学学生。该计划的好处不仅限于提供质量评估解决方案，还提供了加强行业伙伴关系的当代战略，从而确保可持续性并避免对评估中心资源密集型的普遍批评。尽管在所提供的环境中进行了背景化，但本案例强调了评估中心的方法和实践对学者的影响，特别是考虑到伙伴关系、学生的能力和就业能力是所有大学部门的重要责任。