The call for proposals for the 2010 IPAC Conference is now open. Formerly known IPMAAC,  IPAC will meet on July 18-21 in Newport Beach, California at the Hyatt Regency.  Session formats include symposia, panel discussions, paper presentations, tutorials, and workshops.  Presentation proposals will be accepted until March 5th.  

pan has long been active in IPMAAC and now IPAC and is proud to have been an conference sponsor for many years. IPAC is an organization of applied HR selection  and assessment professionals, with members who work for both public and private-sector organizations. If you aren’t familiar with the organization, I might suggest you take a look a IPAC website and consider attending or even submitting to the conference.

Reid Klion

The Association of Test Publishers Conference  is coming up on February 7-10 in Orlando. The ATP Conference is a good opportunity to see what is new in the world of testing and meet many of people who are active in the industry. The conference program has tracks on promoting state-of-the-art assessment, integrating technology into assessment, and innovations in test security. pan will also have a booth in the exhibit hall, and a number of us will be attending including Doug Cole, Jocelyn Courtney (who recently became Secretary of the ATP I-O Division), and Jenni Ginsburg. If you will be there and would like to arrange a time to meet with one of us, please drop me a note. We look forward to seeing you in Orlando in a couple of weeks!

Reid Klion

Writing items for tests and surveys is often more difficult than it appears. There are professional guidelines for item writing but it is also an art that might be best learned through experience and observing how items perform when they are actually used.

How an item is written can have a substantial impact upon how subjects respond to it and inadvertently skew the results. As an example, I received what was labeled a survey in the mail the other day. Here are a couple of items:

-Do you believe that Barack Obama's nominees for federal courts should be immediately and unquestionably approved for their lifetime appointments by the U.S. Senate?

-Do you believe the best way to increase the quality and effectiveness of public education in the U.S. is to rapidly expand federal funding while eliminating performance standards and accountability?

To be honest, I suspect that the underling intent of the survey is to motivate political supporters (as opposed to actually being an opinion poll) because it was accompanied by a fund raising request. And regardless of one’s political leanings, I suspect that it would be difficult to find anyone who would endorse either of these statements as written. However, it illustrates how an item is constructed can impact the results. In this case, I think that it is fair to conclude this was the intent. Problems do occur, though, when the goal is gather information in an unbiased way but poor item writing gets in the way.

Reid Klion

One of the major reasons to use an assessment is to ascertain if a candidate is actually capable of doing the job. While there other ways to accomplish this, such as reviewing references and resumes, these approaches can fall short. Unfortunately, employers often do a poor job of actually checking references and many of us don’t verify a candidate’s educational history. (There haven been some well-documented cases of people in high profile positions who don’t have the background they claimed. For example, there is the former director of admissions at MIT didn’t have any of the degrees listed on her resume and George O’Leary who was the head football coach at Notre Dame for 5 days until it was discovered that both his claims to have played college football and having a graduate degree were false.)

Another challenge in credentials verification is the apparent growth of degree granting universities that may not have particularly stringent academic standards. There is growing concern  about U.S. military personnel getting degrees (almost wholly paid for by the government) from propriety, for profit institutions. While the students who enroll in these programs do so with good intentions, they often discover their degrees are not well-regarded by employers because of the nature of the schools. In a similar vein, there is a physics professor at the University of Illinois who has essentially been on a crusade against diploma mills, businesses often based outside the United States where one can essentially purchase a degree without fulfilling any requirements at all. When it comes to vetting a job candidate’s credentials, it is important the employers have a way of verifying that an individual actually has the qualifications to do the job well. Whether it be with looking into a candidate’s credentials or using an assessment, this is critical information to have before making a hiring decision.

Reid Klion

The Internal Revenue Service recently announced that it intends to develop a testing program for tax preparers. While CPAs and enrolled agents (non-attorneys who may represent clients before the IRS) have had testing and licensure programs for a number of years, the estimated 900,000 to 1.2 million individuals who prepare tax returns for a fee can do so without any sort of credential. The logic behind this new IRS initiative is to protect the public from incompetent or unscrupulous practitioners. Apparently, this move is supported by some of the large tax preparations firms who view this as a way to force ill-prepared practitioners out of the field.

There are some who argue that licensure programs should not exist because they represent a restraint of trade and that the market should be the sole determinant of who can offer professional services. Indeed, there may be situations where the development of a licensure program may be a bit misguided. (For example, there is a battle in Virginia over the licensure of yoga schools.) That being said, tax preparation very much seems a situation where some form of regulation seems reasonable to protect the public. Similarly, until the recent mortgage crisis, many states did not have a licensure program for mortgage brokers. To that end, pan was pleased to assist the Indiana Secretary of State in implementing a testing program for loan brokerage professionals.

Reid Klion

While yesterday's post looked at where the jobs are anticipated to be in the coming decade, it is also helpful to see what happened over the past 10 years in terms of employment. Overall, the picture was not rosy. Indeed, the past decade saw no net job creation. In a similar vein, many households are making less money now (when adjusted for inflation) than they were 10 years ago. While the pain this has created is real, it also should be noted that some of this is due to measurement issues as the late 1990s were times marked by economic growth largely fueled by an investment bubble that subsequently burst while we are currently working through some economic issues that haven’t been seen since prior to the Second World War. As a result, the past decade is bracketed between a high point and what is an historic low.

All that being said, one can only hope that the early signs of improvement in the job picture continue to emerge. Additionally, the trend toward workers returning to school for additional training as well as the emergence of specialized training programs can only lead toward increasing the overall value of the pool of human capital that is available.

Reid Klion

Best wishes for 2010! The past several days have been an opportunity for many to take some time from work and enjoy family and friends. The end of the year (and, in this case, what is arguably the end of a decade), is also a time for reflection and anticipation.

In turning attention to human capital and workforce development, one topic to consider is where job growth will be in the coming decade. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the high growth positions will be in professional/business services, health care, and service industries while manufacturing will continue to dwindle. The positions with the highest growth potential are seen to be in the management, scientific, and technical consulting services while the greatest anticipated losses are expected to be in textile and apparel manufacturing. Here is a nice graphic representing the BLS data.

While unemployment still hovers around 10%, there are some recent signs of improvement. However, there are concerns that much of the job growth is in lower skilled positions, especially in home health care, customer service, and food preparation as well as the realization that the days of well-paid factory work largely may be a thing of the past. Interestingly, the best-paying positions in which there is substantial growth but require limited training is long-haul truck driving.

Reid Klion

A recent article by Filip Lievens, Deniz Ones, and Stephan Dilchert looked at the relationship between personality and medial school success. This  follows the path of other researchers who are looking at non-cognitive factors in predicting academic outcomes.

They followed 600 Belgian medical students longitudinally throughout their academic careers. (Differing from the US model where medical school is essentially a 4-year graduate program, European students typically enter medical school directly from high school in what is a 7-year program.) They found that personality differentially predicted medical school outcome based upon the changing demands of medical school. (Especially in the European model, the first few years are comprised almost exclusively of basic science while latter years have an increased focus on clinical work and patient contact.) For example, openness and extraversion had increased validity in predicting performance over the 7-year period. Similarly, they found that while conscientiousness predicted grades throughout a medical student’s career, its validity increased from .18 to .45.

These specific findings aside, the article also is a good reminder that it can be important to study the validity of a predictor over time, especially in situations where task demands are dynamic and change predictably over time.

Reid Klion

There is an old saying that an economic downturn turns into a depression as soon as you lose your job. With the current unemployment rate now at 10% (and down a bit from October’s high of 10.2%), there are substantial numbers of people who are  unable to find work. A recent New York Times/CBS News poll documents some of the common issues faced by the unemployed ranging from the obvious financial hardships to mental health issues and family conflict. Consistent with other reports, a healthy number are considering job re-training or a return to school.

In terms of the future, Paul Krugman, a Nobel Prize winner for economics, is concerned that job creation efforts have not gone far enough.  (He also makes tthe interesting point out that the economy needs to add over 100,000 jobs a month simply to keep up with population growth.) While he believes that the government did the right thing in stabilizing the banks last year, efforts have not been sufficient on the job front. However, rather than viewing the cup as half-empty, others see some positive news on the horizon. For example, unemployment claims are edging downward, there are increases in productivity, and seasonal hiring is at its highest level since 2004. Regardless, it is clear that the current economic situation has created substantial difficulty for millions (as well as for the business who want to thrive). We can only hope that these early signs of improvement are a signal of things to come.

Reid Klion

The Indian Institutes of Management decided to move the Common Admission Test (required for admission to Indian MBA programs and similar to the GMAT in North America) to a computer-based test delivery model available over a ten day period. (In previous years, the test was administered in paper/pencil format on only one day.) This year, nearly 200,000 candidates applied to take the exam. Unfortunately, due to a number of factors including widespread hardware issues and a Cornflicker virus infection, there were major problems in delivering the test. A number of testing centers had to be shut down with reports indicating that some 10%-18% of candidates had to be re-scheduled (though it appears all who were not successful in doing so). Given the scale of the program, it has garnered substantial coverage in the press as well as in the Indian Parliament and brought forth public interest from number of other test delivery organizations that manage large-scale test delivery projects in India and would like to take on the project next year.

Reid Klion