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Psychometric testing

About Psychometrics and Disc
(Published 12 January 2005)

A DISC Profile is a psychometric testing technique that uses a simple questionnaire as a basis for revealing insights into a person's behaviour. Recruiters around the world have been using this Psychometric technique for decades, but now myDISCprofile gives you the chance to see your own DISC profile.

A DISC Profile can help you explore many different features of your own personal style, including your approach to home and work life, your communication style and motivation, your particular strengths, and a lot more besides.

Because so many recruiters use DISC as their preferred psychometric test, your profile can be a valuable jobseeking aid, too. Your DISC profile shows you the kind of information potential employers will have access to, helping you to plan your approach to maximise your potential.

Click here for online psychometric testing with MyDISC Profile

There are many ways of evaluating an individual's skills or approach, and predicting their likely behaviour from the results.

At one end of the scale are fairly simple psychometric tests designed to evaluate specific skills and abilities, such as an examination or driving test. At the other end of the scale lie batteries of personality tests, designed to build as complete a picture of a person's style and approach, in general terms, as possible.

DISC lies somewhere between these two poles. While it isn't a full 'personality test' in the strict technical sense, it provides an insight into an individual style that is more than adequate to predict the likely trends of their behaviour in the future. It does this by evaluating four key factors in an individual style, rather than the sixteen or more that are often seen in full personality tests (for example, DISC makes no attempt to measure such factors as intelligence).

This confers the advantage of greater accessibility: while a full test battery will often contain literally hundreds of questions, and take hours to complete, a DISC profile questionnaire contains only twenty-four, and can be usually be performed in fifteen minutes or less. This also provides advantages in the area of interpretation; while the interpretation of results from a full test remains in the province of experts, DISC results are sufficiently well-defined that their interpretation can be almost completely automated.

What can DISC tell me?

At its most basic level, DISC measures four factors of an individual's behaviour: Dominance, Influence, Steadiness and Compliance. These are fairly complex constructs, and aren't easily expressed in single words, but they can be characterised as assertiveness, communication, patience and structure.

The real power of DISC, though, comes from its ability to interpret the relations between these factors. For example where a highly Dominant person has an equally high level of Influence, they will behave quite differently to an equally Dominant individual without that Influence. The factors combine like this to provide (theoretically) around one million different 'profiles' (that is, combinations of the four factors).

Using this information, DISC can be used to describe a person's general approach, including their motivations and dislikes, strengths and weaknesses, and some of the basic assumptions they make about other people. It can also go far in helping to predict how a person will react to a specific set of circumstances.

Once you have completed the DISC profile questionnaire you can view your personal DISC report. The Classic myDISCprofile report gives an in-depth analysis into your personal style and behaviour. You can also choose to upgrade to an Enhanced report which contains a more detailed analysis, including sections on specific work areas such as sales and service. myDISCprofile also offers you the chance to purchase a professional PDF version of your report, which can be used to supplement your CV (or résumé) for job applications.

As well as these report options, myDISCprofile offers you the chance to compare your profile against a particular job roles to explore your suitability to that role. Below, you can see an example of a job match report, in this case comparing a DISC profile against the ideal profile for a Project Manager. A full range of other work roles are also available.

However, don't take our word for it. As you can see from the following quote, psychometric testing is fast becoming an integral part of the recruitment process.

"It has been estimated that some 70 per cent of UK organisations test their workforce either for personality or ability before making a job offer or conferring a promotion."- Personnel Today magazine

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