Self Assessment
See yourself from a different view point
Personal Growth
Self-assessment is vital for personal growth, learning new things and gaining greater self-confidence from greater self awareness.
Self-assessment is the ability to examine yourself to find out how much progress you have made. It is a skill that helps you monitor your own work or abilities, find out what your weaknesses and strengths are, and self-diagnose relevant solutions. It enables you to plan your development and your career but also to make corrections quickly and thus improve your abilities.
Furthermore, self-assessment makes you sure and confident about your capabilities. It eliminates or reduces work-related fear and uncertainty.
Add value
How have you helped your organisation generate income, reduce costs, solve problems and improve the quality of its service?
At the end of the day, you want to know that you are clearly providing your employer value for money, but also that you can continue to learn, adapt, add more value and provide yourself with greater employment security.
You may feel a sense of trepidation or even fear at the thought of stepping outside your comfort zone. But making and taking opportunities to learn new things and then to put this knowledge to good use is often rewarding, interesting and research shows that it is great for our self-esteem.
SFIA
The SFIA Foundation is a global not-for-profit organisation which oversees the production and use of the Skills Framework for the Information Age.
SFIA describes skills and competencies required by professionals in roles involved in information and communication technologies, digital transformation and software engineering. Read more here at SFIA Online.
We have our own VFS Skills and Competency framework (The Crystal Model) that goes deeper into technical skills, critical behaviours, motivation factors and even individual & team performance dynamics. This helps us to help our clients become incredibly innovative, agile and performant by increasing both individual competency levels and collective competence.
The SFIA framework has been designed to provide a means of useful comparison and consistency across our industry. Furthermore, some of our clients use SFIA. Therefore, our Crystal Model is a SFIA compatible, 3 dimensional model of Skills, Attributes and Responsibility for assessment. Read more here in our deep dive.
We have designed these assessment tools to help you reflect on your own strengths and development areas, as impartially unbiased as possible.
What is Competence?
There are many definitions of what ‘competence’ is and this probably reflects that it’s a complex concept; you know it when you see it (or more often when you don’t see it), but it’s difficult to describe. Most definitions include references to ‘ability’, ‘skills’ and ‘knowledge’.
We have already mentioned how SFIA use Skills, Attributes and Responsibility.
Competence is more than any one of these components on its own. There is also a tacit acceptance that competence develops over time, indicating that experience is an important factor. These attributes all relate to an individual’s ability; whether they are able to do the task. However, an important consideration should surely also be whether the individual chooses to apply these attributes; their commitment and willingness to perform.
Our Crystal model, developed in partnership with Victoria Labs, is a comprehensive, multi-dimensional representation of competence. As with all questionnaire style interactions, the questions you will be asked have been intentionally designed and worded to overlap one another a little. This may seem like we're asking the same question more than once.
This is to enable some clever algorithms to combine and correlate your answers, to improve the accuracy of the assessment with scientific rigour.
It will take you approximately 20 minutes to complete. You will be presented with a series of questions and phrases, such as “Do you take ownership of mistakes and how to resolve them?” and “Are you willing to take on challenges and responsibility to help ensure better results?”, and asked to indicate your agreement or disagreement with those phrases as they apply to you, typically and personally. Make sure that you are not tired, unhappy, anxious, hungry, or likely to be disturbed while you answer the questions, and that you are giving yourself enough time to consider your answers carefully.