Psychologist

ABOUT

Hilton Calder

Hilton is a Clinical Psychologist who works independently in the Clinical/Sport/Health Psychology fields, in Business Consulting and in Human Resources. He is a director at Career Custodians, a career and recruitment facilitating company and is chairman of the Non-Profit Organization, The Learning Initiative. He also works on a session basis at a holistic chronic illness clinic that specialises in natural treatment methodologies.

He has a B.A. degree in Communications, a Masters degree in Clinical Psychology and has studied towards a B. Comm. (Hons.) degree in Information Systems. Extensive on-the-job training has also been received in the fields mentioned above.

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Practical experience has been gained as an employee/consultant in the civil service, in small and large commercial organisations, in educational organisations and as an independent psychologist/consultant. Hilton also has owned and run his own franchise enterprise in the service industry.

Hilton has also worked with Hockey and Cricket teams at a national level and counselled individual sports men and women. A specialised, professional psychometric evaluation service is also offered to grade 11 and 12 learners to assist them in making subject and career choices.

Priscila Da Silva

Company Generic | Human Resource Management | Psychometric Assessment Options

Company Generic is currently considering using Psychometric Assessment processes to aid in staff selection and development. This proposal will address the following options:

1. Assessments to select/develop candidates at entry and junior levels.
2. Assessments to select/develop middle and senior managers/specialists.
3. Assessments to assist in executive selection/development.
4. On-Line assessments. These are unsupervised and therefore only include the personality and interest questionnaires.

What does Psychometric Testing Measure?

Whilst some information can be obtained about an individual’s personal attributes by observation and interviewing, the four main aspects of the individual which are most significant in predicting job success are the most difficult to determine by these traditional methods. Consequently, psychometric tools are used to accurately assess the person’s strengths and development areas in the following areas.

ABILITY

Ability tests measure a person’s present skills, such as level of verbal or numerical reasoning competence and their level of potential to learn new skills.

PERSONALITY

Personality scales are used to determine how a person will behave in certain situations, and how the abilities possessed will be put to use.

APTITUDE

Aptitude tests measure the degree of potential a person has to develop job skills in certain areas of work (sales, accountancy, engineering, design, production etc).

INTERESTS

Interest questionnaires measure a person’s preference for certain fields of work, giving a measure of a person’s application to work and ability to derive personal satisfaction from it.

CAREER GUIDANCE
MY APPROACH

My work in the field of career guidance and evaluation started with clients aged 27 to 33 years wanting to change careers. Many of these people had professional qualifications but were unhappy and unfulfilled in their careers. This impacted negatively on their lives as a whole.

In the past I usually recommended a full psychometric assessment, which, included cognitive (thinking skills and/or I.Q. assessments), personality, aptitude and interest assessments. During the feedback sessions it was repeatedly evident that the personality profiles were the best indicators of the career to which the client was best suited. Over time it became evident that, if the client had received the personality profiling information before choosing the first career, they my have made a different choice. Further, interest and aptitude questionnaires tend to be more transparent and therefore possibly more influenced by current trends and peer group pressure.

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As a result of the above experience I have been focusing primarily on personality profiling when working in the career guidance field. Personality profile results also appear to be more consistent over time. The usual assessment battery consists of two personality questionnaires and one combined personality/interest questionnaire. Using multiple questionnaires allows for the identification of trends or to highlight the degree of uncertainty about preferences, regarding career options for each individual. The cognitive assessment also seems to be of lesser importance as the individual’s Grade 11/12 results – not intelligence or IQ scores – determine, to a large extent, which tertiary course can be followed. In a similar way, the graduate study results, usually determines which post-graduate courses can be taken.

The Assessment Process

The Assessment is requested

The candidate supplies me with full names, date of birth and a safe e-mail address

I send a link with the questionnaires to that address

The candidate independently completes the questionnaires, preferably in one sitting. For Subject Choice Assessments (Grade 9 learners) a cognitive assessment to assess cognitive preferences needs to be done at my office (maximum 45 minutes)

I receive the results and we arrange a 60 to 90 minutes face to face feedback session

Computer generated reports are sent to the candidate

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