Lesson 2

Situational Assessments - slide 5

Identify and Analyze Jobs
Talk with the employer.
Meet and observe coworkers.
Develop job duty schedule.
Develop task analyses.

Lets assume now that you have identified several job tasks or job types that the individual would like to experience as situational assessments. Now I think there are some things we need to think about within the context of actually going to the workplace with the individual who is going to be participating. And one of those things really centers around preparation and knowing what you are going to do and how you are going to fit into that workplace once you get there with the individual.

That pretty much translates to me into visiting the worksite, discussing with the employer what the actual assessment will entail; how long you are going to be there; what job duties the two of you agree on that the individual will be performing. In order to do that you are most likely going to have to either ask to observe several departments in the business. If the company is a large one to identify those job tasks so you will most likely need to talk to supervisors of the workplace or the coworkers and/or I should say the coworkers who are actually performing those job duties.

I would certainly suggest that you spend adequate time in that site without the individual who is going to be participating in the assessment to actually produce a job duty schedule of what he/she will be doing once there. This will really prevent any problems with the whole issue of doing work for the company as opposed to doing an actual assessment. The other thing I think is important to consider is to consider developing a task analysis for the job duties that you select.
Now why do you need a task analysis? In reality I think its good to develop a task analysis for the assessment pure and simply to be familiar with the task you have selected. If you merely observe and don’t really record anything or develop a task analysis, you may not actually have a good idea about how that particular activity is completed in that workplace.
Does that mean that you should stand with a clipboard and observe the coworkers and develop a task analysis? Well no, I think that would be a very intrusive and probably would be considered somewhat odd within the workplace. The coworkers would probably think you are there to observe them or to evaluate them, which is certainly not the case.
In addition to spending some time observing for the development of the task analysis, I think its also very beneficial to work the job duty yourself so that you can really have a little bit of experience with those tasks before you bring the individual into the workplace for assessment. Familiarizing yourself with the environment, where things are kept, what is sort of the unspoken code as far as fitting into that workplace. For instance, I know in one place where we did situational assessments the coworkers where not allowed to interact or talk with each other within the workspace or work area. If we had not known that prior to going into doing situational assessment, we could have come into that workplace with our individual and have been very disruptive. So I think its critical to have sort of a lay of the land prior to actually completing the assessment with the individual.