Development Assessment Centres: Practice Implications Arising from Exploring the Participant Voice

This qualitative phenomenological study explores the short-to-medium term personal impact of Development Assessment Centres on UK healthcare managers. The study identified overarching themes relating to personal performance impact, enabling and disabling factors in Centre design, trauma and safety implications, and behavioural adaptation. Practice implications arising focused upon three key areas. Firstly, Centre design should equally enable both introverts and extraverts and provide conscious consideration toward behavioural adaptation amongst participants. Secondly, there is a need for adequate follow-up support to enable participants to continue to learn from their experience, whilst also mitigating any potential risk toward long-term trauma caused by such deeply personal experiences. Finally, where assessment and reward form an output from any Centre, judgement should be limited until a thorough de-brief has been undertaken with the participant to explore causal behavioural responses, as opposed to basing decisions on observed behaviour alone.