Early January Is Demo Skills Assessment Time!

The start of the New Year… what a terrific time to perform anassessment of your own or your team’s demo skills! Doing an assessment now establishes abaseline for measuring change and improvement during the course of the year –and it only takes about 10 minutes per assessment.
For Yourself: Do anassessment of yourself. Have yourmanager do an assessment of you. Haveyour peers do assessments of their perceptions of your skills. Then compare…

For Your Team: Do thesame process, essentially – have each team member do an assessment of their ownskills; do assessments yourself of each member’s skills; and consider havingpeers do assessments of one another.

In addition to establishing a baseline for the year, gapsthat are uncovered between individuals, peers and managers can be quiteilluminating and represent opportunities for discussion, coaching, mentoring orother skills development possibilities ([warning: shameless self-promotion alert!] e.g., Great Demo! Workshops, Master Classes,Coaching, etc.).

When should you do your next assessment? I’m glad you asked that question… Next year? Far too long between assessments to be of sufficient value. Twice per year? Still too infrequent. I’d recommend re-assessing skills every 2, 3,or 4 months and setting small, incremental goals for improvement accordingly (bythe way, there is nothing sacred about quarters for skills development –sometimes picking an interval that is NOT tied to quarters can be much moreeffective!).

Where can you find a good demo skills assessment template touse (or to use as a starting point)? Feel free to send me an email at PCohan@SecondDerivative.com and I’llsend you ready-to-use (also new and improved!) demo skills assessments forindividuals and/or for teams. You arewelcome to use these directly or edit as desired.