‘Reflect’ to assess your personal & professional ‘Soft Skills’ for success at workplace
Andrew Martelli VP-product development, GMAC
‘Reflect’ by GMAC is a self-assessment and development tool that evaluates personal and professional soft skills imperative in today’s workplace.
Andrew Martelli, vice president of product development at GMAC talks about the importance of soft skills and the role of ‘Reflect’ – named a Top HR Product of 2013 by Human Resource Executive magazine – recognized for the innovation it brings to the HR industry.
Q. Why are ‘soft skills’ important?
Today’s young professionals must be prepared with not only the technical knowledge, but also the soft skills and self-awareness that are often indicative of success in management roles.
Soft skills are personal attributes that enhance an individual’s interactions, job performance, and career prospects. These are important to how work gets done and how individual and organizational success is achieved.
To meet this demand, GMAC and Hogan developed Reflect, the only product of its kind that combines world-class Hogan personality assessments with reporting and self-development advice tailored to the user. It gives today’s entry-level professionals the ability to understand their strengths, identify areas for improvement and work to develop their skills proactively to perform better.
Reflect measures the essence of your personality – what a person’s natural inclination is. Personality is key to soft skills since it is a significant driver of our behaviour – especially when relatively new to the workplace – or when under stress or pressure. Our behaviour, in turn, drives reputation, and our reputation is what gets individuals hired, promoted – or not. Over time, individuals can leverage these insights to build skills that help offset their weaknesses and to leverage - but not overuse - their key strengths. For example, a person high in Innovation may provide many new ideas and concepts to a team (the positive), but might not be able to stop providing insights – even after the team has agreed to a solution (the negative). With the insights delivered by Reflect, individuals can accelerate development on modifying and adapting their behavior to be productive and foster new skills and coping mechanisms to avoid these potential derailers.
Q. How schools make use of Reflect?
Reflect is a personal development tool that can help students gain not only valuable soft skills knowledge and information expected of today’s MBA, but also the self-awareness and personal acumen which will allow them to better present themselves to prospective employers. Reflect can be incorporated in orientation, student advising, leadership development courses, as well as career coaching and preparation. In addition, the self-directed design makes it an ideal tool for programs with limited faculty or coaching resources. Programs not facing resource constraints can use Reflect to enhance the one on one coaching experience with students. Finally, Because Reflect is written in the language of business and measures competencies required for success in a global business environment, it can be used as a complement to course activity around themes of leadership development, emotional intelligence, effective communication and teamwork.
Q. How is Reflect different from any other soft skills assessment test?
Reflect is different from other assessments in several ways. First, Reflect is designed to be more user friendly for self-paced development, to be used and interpreted by an individual– without requiring support of a career or leadership coach. Many other personality assessments require support from someone authorized to share insights from the assessment.
Second, Reflect leverages a competency model developed with input from corporate recruiters and business schools meaning it was designed to be used in and for business and management education. Moreover, Reflect offers an interactive benchmarking feature that helps an individual evaluate any key “gaps” between their competencies and what has been deemed important for success in their chosen profession along with tips and suggestions on how to begin their development in these areas.
Reflect provides a personalized action plan, career development resources and a benchmarking section so participants can compare their scores against high-performing professionals across 14 different career paths. The competencies being measured by Reflect are those identified by corporate recruiters as being essential for success in a global business environment.
Q. How is the acceptance of Reflect in India?
Ever since the global launch of Reflect in February 2013, we have received positive feedback from users around the world.
In India, The S.P. Jain Institute of Management and Research, one of India’s leading business schools implemented ‘Reflect’ in June this year.
Around 240 PGDM students took the 45 minutes soft skill assessment to answer the multiple choice questions and evaluate themselves on 10 attributes, which included innovation, interpersonal intuition, valuing others, strategic self-awareness, strategic vision, resilience, decision making, collaboration, drive and operational thinking.
Reflect is an interactive, customizable competency solution available online and can be purchased from the GMAC Reflect website.
