Product Description
The book is a preparation tool for the 140,000 police officers plus other law enforcement personnel who work in police departments which report that they use a specific and increasingly used procedure, known as the Assessment Center as a major part of their decision as to who gets promoted.
This decision regarding who gets promoted is among the two or three major decisions in a police officer's life. More specifically, the importance rests on the following three points: 1. If the Officer is promoted, s/he immediately begins earning between $7,000.00 and $9,500.00 more every year for the rest of her/his career, 2. The successful candidate is now elibible to compete for higher level jobs for which they were previously unqualified to compete, 3. there is substantial prestige and better working conditions for Police Sergeant than there are for the Police Officer.
The candidates for promotion know how to study for a multiple choice written test but many of them are looking for a resource to use in preparing for the promotional testing. I ought to know this because I have been creating and implementing assessment centers for Police Departments and Fire Departments across the country since 1974.
What is an assessment center? It is a highly predictive and merit based process for selecting supervisors and managers from among line workers. It uses simulations of the typical type of problems that a supervisor would encounter on the job (e.g. an In Basket Exercise which simulates the contents of a supervisor's in basket and requires her/him to make various decisions, a Coaching Exeercise which requires the candidate to prepare for and conduct a meeting with a person who plays the role of a Police Officer with some type of work problem, etc.)The book not only comes with a sealed packet of three assessment center exercises but also the answers to the exercises so that the reader can not only read about the process and practice actual assessment center exercises but also compare their performance against a scoring guide which is also contained in the packet and make changes before they attend their promotional assessment center.
Read more!
Police Assessment Center Preparation
Find this first on the used market if you can and this should not be your first pick for police assessment center preparation. It is very generic and spends too much time on the overview of the process. Candidates for promotion do not always need to know the legality of an assessment center nor the reasons some agencies select them as a testing process. Law enforcement professionals competing for promotion have little choice in the agencies decision to use this process and normally little time to prepare. When compared to even an ARCO Sergeants test prep book, the three chapters on assessment center exercises were more concise and informative. It does include good exercises to familiarize yourself with the process and the author's advice is consistent with others.