Assessing Human Competence: Practical Guidelines for the South African Manager

# Assessing Human Competence: Practical Guidelines for the South African Manager

By: Elaine Saunders, 2000

Amidst a minefield of challenges and obstacles that surrounds assessment in South Africa, Elaine Saunders comes with clear, coherent guidelines for implementing and understanding competency-based, job-related assessment.

Apart from being practical and well tested in the workplace, her model has the advantage of incorporating all the ethics, technology, training and cultural issues without which it is not possible to implement a fair assessment process in a culturally heterogeneous country such as South Africa.

Saunders believes a competency-based approach to assessment can make a major contribution to development in South Africa and the creation of opportunity. "Utilizing the competency-based model as a basis for the training and development of equity candidates is a far more ethical and financially viable method of responding to the requirements of Employment Equity".

She also provides intelligent, helpful discussions of: # the polemic surrounding psychometric testing, which can make the most valuable

contribution in the measurement of intellectual ability and learning potential, # the role of unions as stakeholders in assessment which is crucial in the development of transparency in the assessment process, # the importance of defensible ethics in assessment and the

need to be selective in those whom we identify as assessors, # the role of assessment as a self-development tool. Saunders' book is one of the best guides to assessment available for the South African situation.

# Performance Scorecards

By: Richard Y Chang & Mark W Morgan, 2001

Despite a daily deluge of reports, e-mails and briefings, most business leaders can't tell whether their organisations are winning or losing.

Performance Scorecards helps these busy leaders slice through the information glut to reduce the time they have to spend deciphering data and increase their ability to make the right business decisions.

But while other scorecards track a predetermined set of indicators, Performance Scorecards can be customised to measure the factors specific to an individual organisation's progress, providing a greater degree of flexibility than ever before.

Contents Include: # Setting the Stage for Scorecards, # Collect Scorecard Inputs, # Create Your Scorecard, #Cultivate Your Scorecard, # Cascade Your Scorecard, # Connect Your Scorecard, # Confirm Your Scorecard, #Knowing the Score.