Hi Rajul, An interesting query raised and that was just the thought that ruptured my mind a few months back. McClelland, back in the early 70s, found that academic performance was a poor predictor of accomplishments later on in life. Also, the academic system is harsher on certain kinds of people. Back then, Mclelland felt it was harsh on women and minorities. With the benefit of theories such as Gardner's multi intelligences that have evolved since, I conjecture that we can rephrase that to say that it only rewards people with 2 or 3 types of intelligences. Read books on competency theory for more on this.
Clearly, the academic system is designed only to generate academics and researchers.
Ditto for intelligence tests - very poor predictors of job performance. One source of details on this debate is Goleman's book, Emotional Intelligence.
However, the catch is, if not acads and IQ, then what? Aptitude, you say. But how do you measure it? Again, competency theory. There are, by now, many readymade, well-researched models available for some of the positions that you have mentioned. But, all the research is international. And, even if you do find a piece of research done here, you still would not be able to ascertain whether it applied to your organization's context exactly. The surest way would be to learn the process and then conduct that research by yourself in your organization. And that is cumbersome.
There is a cheat available to this game, though: take a standard competency model for, say, long cycle sales (which is what your techno-commercial sales job would amount to, I believe). Apply it to your top 10 salesmen and the 10 salesmen with average performance. Does the model neatly differentiate between the two in terms of scores? If it does, you can be sure to some extent that the model is valid in your organization.
Besides competency theory, there are all manner of tests of different skill types available (some of them you have listed in your message). The validity of most of those tests is suspect. In fact, I would like to know (and therefore look forward to contributions from others), which of these tests have been tried out and have been found to be accurate predictors of performance (obviously, I would be interested to know the research design that was applied to establish that the test was an accurate predictor).
At any rate, to test using a questionnaire how well someone DOES something just does not make sense to me, however well anyone may explain this to me.
Hope those were useful thoughts for you! Shantanuji
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