INSIGHT Defense Pro

Population: INSIGHT Defense Professional is calibrated for military leaders from senior enlisted through officer ranks and for defense professionals and contractors who are responsible for direct action and leadership decision-making and for those who supervise those individuals.

Administration: Administer at any time, in any location with our user-friendly, encrypted, online, multi-lingual interface.

Support Materials: INSIGHT User Manual: Includes all needed information for the administration and interpretation of individual and group scores. A separate INSIGHT Defense Professional Debrief Document, which client may elect to provide to the persons who are assessed, is available at no additional charge.

Specs: Max 90 minutes timed administration.

• 30 minutes allotted for 90 Likert-style Agree-Disagree items – professional mindset attribute belief, value, interaction style, and expectation statements.
• 60 minutes allotted for 37 engaging, military-setting scenario-based reasoning skill evaluation questions.

Deliverables: Individual score reports of all metrics for each person assessed. Optional group graphics with statistical summary of scores; Excel spreadsheet of responses to all custom demographic questions, and all scores for each person assessed.

Results Reported (Actionable Metrics):

• Seven Professional Mindset Attributes

1. Communicative Confidence – Self-confidence in oral and written communication
2. Professional Confidence — Self-assurance in handling role expectations
3. Intellectual Integrity – Courage and drive to seek truth and reach best judgment possible
4. Mental Focus – Diligence, task-orientation; taking an organized approach to problems.
5. Mental Rigor – Willingness to analyze problems and situations deeply
6. Foresight – Consistent effort to anticipate consequences
7. Cognitive Maturity – Expectation of making timely, well-considered judgments

• Three Interaction Style Characteristics

1. Expression – Ranging from “Expressive Performer” to “Quiet Observer” 
2. Teamwork – Ranging from “Consistent Collaborator” to “Lone Competitor”
3. Directness – Ranging from “Approval Seeker” to “Forthright Declarer”

Essential Reasoning Skills of Defense Professionals, and an OVERALL rating:

1. Ambiguous Contexts – Judgment in ambiguous, risky, and uncertain contexts
2. Precise Contexts – Judgment in precisely defined, logically rigorous contexts
3. Problem Analysis – Accurate identification of the problem and decision-critical elements
4. Quantitative Contexts – Judgment using numerical and quantitative information
5. Evaluating Alternatives – Assessing opinions, options, priorities, and the strength of arguments

OVERALL Reasoning Skills – Sustained use of reasoning skills to reach optimal judgments

Scoring:

• Each professional mindset attribute is scored on a 40-point scale divided into three qualitative categories (Not Manifested, Positive, Strong Positive).
• Each professional interactive style characteristics is scored 0 through 40. Scores at the extremes indicate consistent manifestation of that end of the style characteristic spectrum.  Mid-range scores indicate situational awareness and manifestation of both aspects of that interactive characteristic.
• Each professional reasoning skill metric is scored on a 300-point scale with corresponding qualitative ratings (Not Manifested, Moderate, Strong, and Superior).

Optional Custom Questions: At no additional cost clients can add up to ten client-specific custom descriptive survey questions to the assessment profile to enable sub-group reports.

Currently Available Languages: English

Licenses to Administer: Sold globally exclusively by Insight Assessment to government agencies, defense contractors, military organizations, recruiters, and consultants; competitive grant-funded project directors; qualified researchers and doctoral dissertation scholars; and other for-profit and not-for-profit military, defense, and government related entities.

Comprehensive assessment services are available to our clients using any of the assessments in our INSIGHT series, including INSIGHT Defense Professional, at no additional cost:

Starting with an initial consultation to learn about your project, our experienced assessment specialists support your project in multiple ways. 

• Instrument selection: We help the client find the INSIGHT tool that best fits the organizational level and industry sector of the individuals to be assessed.
• Administration strategies: Clients can keep test takers anonymous or use personal identifiers; sampling methods can measure an aggregated group profile without testing everyone.
• Assessment logistics: We help clients assess job applicants onsite or remotely; for development projects, we help in gathering pre- or post- training aggregated assessment data.
• Privacy Protection: We assist the client with privacy protection strategies, including, if needed, completely anonymous double-blind assessments.
• Introducing client-specific custom questions: Clients can enable organizing, managing, and analyzing the assessment data that they plan to collect by introducing up to ten client-designed demographic profile questions. We assist clients with this process.
• Login generation: We provide the client with as many single-use individual logins as requested so that test-takers can access our secure, encrypted, online assessment interface in a controlled manner.
• Report generation: We manage the online report generation tool and produce, at the client’s request, group reports, aggregating and disaggregating data by their client-specific custom demographic questions. Individual reports can be sent automatically in real time.
• 24/7/365 emergency technical support for our client testing administrators

We demonstrate how easy it is to administer assessments using our intuitive, browser-based, multilingual online testing system on almost any device: computer, tablet, or smartphone.

In addition to the full user manual included with each assessment instrument, preview packages enable future clients to experience the intended assessment tool in exactly the same way it will be used in their planned project. 

Defense Professional Mindset Attributes

• Communicative Confidence: Communicative confidence measures confidence in oral and written communication and assesses attitudes about technical writing. Professionals who strongly manifest communicative confidence believe that they can lead groups through the presentation of oral arguments, to read well, and to write effectively about analyses and opinions.
• Professional Confidence: Professional confidence is the self-assurance felt by newly assigned, enrolled, hired, or newly promoted individuals regarding their readiness to handle the stress, competitiveness, vocabulary, workload, instructional or orientation methods, and related complexities associated with their new role. Individuals who strongly manifest professional confidence have a positive sense of efficacy in their professional role.
• Intellectual Integrity: Intellectual integrity is the discipline of striving to be thorough and honest, to learn the truth or to reach the best decision possible in each situation. A person with intellectual integrity has a driving desire to follow reasons and evidence courageously wherever they may lead. Individuals who strongly manifest intellectual integrity value objectivity, evidence-based decision making, and the courageous, fair-minded, and complete pursuit of the best possible knowledge in any given situation.
• Mental Focus: Mental focus is the discipline or habit of being diligent, systematic, task-oriented, organized, and clear-headed. A positive score indicates a person who endeavors to stay on task and approach problems and learning in systematic, focused, organized, and timely way. Mental focus is valuable because it directs attention to the duties and responsibilities of the task at hand.
• Mental Rigor: Mental rigor is the discipline to work hard to analyze, interpret and achieve a deep understanding of complex material. Individuals who strongly manifest mental rigor are willing to engage difficult material and to work hard to analyze complicated situations and problems. They display a desire for learning, and a concern to achieve a deep understanding of events and their causes.
• Foresight: Foresight is the habit of approaching problems with a view toward anticipating consequences and outcomes. A foresightful person values clarity and the accurate interpretation of complex problem situations. Individuals who strongly manifest foresight value getting the problem right, understanding the reasons pro and con, and projecting the likely outcomes of various options.
• Cognitive Maturity: Cognitive maturity indicates an awareness that there may be multiple potential perspectives on any given situation, problem, proposal, or issue. A person who strongly manifests cognitive maturity endeavors to take this into consideration when making important decisions. This person is likely to move forward when an expeditious decision is required, to hold off deciding if there is time to give the matter fuller consideration, or to reconsider decisions if new evidence emerges.

Professional Interaction Style Characteristics

• Expression: Expression describes a style of interacting with peers that may be quietly observational, expressively performing, or a mix of both depending on context. Expression scores fall into three categories: The “Quiet Observer” prefers to stay in the background and observe others even in social situations with peers. The “Expressive Performer” tends to be highly demonstrative and expressive, particularly when with their peers. The “Situational Observer or Performer” may present as a quiet observer or as an expressive performer depending on the context. They are comfortable letting others do the talking or, if the occasion demands, being the one who presents information, explanations, and analyses.
• Teamwork: Teamwork describes a style of interacting that may be collaborative, competitive or a mix of both depending on what is called for in each situation. Teamwork scores fall into three categories: The “Consistent Collaborator” style may be well suited for professional responsibilities requiring diplomacy and compromise, such as interest-based negotiation and arbitration. The “Lone Competitor” style may be well suited to highly competitive practice settings including potentially confrontational responsibilities. The “Situational Competitor or Collaborator” is comfortable with collaborative effort and with individual competition as well. This style is most effective when working within a collaborative group charged with competing effectively against other groups.
• Directness: Directness describes a style of behaving and speaking in relationship to questions or pressure from peers or superiors aimed at seeking their approval, or forthrightly declaring one’s views, or a mix of both depending on the situation. Directness scores fall into three categories: The “Approval Seeker” tends to present to peers, supervisors and others as being highly agreeable, even if he or she must exaggerate positive characteristics and conceal weaknesses to do so. A “Forthright Declarer” prefers to describe matters exactly as he or she sees them, to speak bluntly, occasionally to the point of painful honesty, and to make decisions with little concern for whether others would approve or agree. “Situationally Direct” individuals may exhibit forthrightness or may withhold their true opinions depending on the situation.

Essential Reasoning Skills of Defense Professionals

• OVERALL: The OVERALL Reasoning Skills metric on the INSIGHT Professional represents the integration of thinking and reasoning skills needed to make operational decisions and to address concerns at the professional levels of an organization. (This is a holistic score which represents the result of the test-taker’s sustained effort at coming to reasoned judgments using the full set of more specific reasoning skills described in the other five metrics.)
• Ambiguous Contexts: Skills in problem solving in contexts of risk, ambiguity and uncertainty are critical for defense professionals. A strong score on this scale indicates excellence in the core reasoning skill of drawing well warranted justified inferences in situations involving probabilistic inductive reasoning, comparative this-is-like-that reasoning, and empirical facts-up-to-theories reasoning. Strengths in this reasoning skill domain lead the problem solver to find the solution that has the strongest likelihood of success, given the information at hand.
• Precise Contexts: Successful defense professionals have the skills necessary to anticipate outcomes and see logical consequences. This scale measures one’s skills in drawing logical inferences in those precisely defined and tightly structured contexts where deductive reasoning plays a critical role. The professional with strengths in this reasoning skill domain will be able to see the applications and the implications of executive directives, company policies, regulations, and protocols which both shape and constrain their problem solving.
• Problem Analysis: A strongly skilled problem solver at the professional level can analyze problem situations and identifying the significance of their key elements. Problem analysis is the capacity to identify the critical elements in a problem solving or decision-making context. The analytical and interpretive skills used in problem analysis enable the professional to determine the issues that must be addressed and the parameters of the problem at hand.
• Quantitative Contexts: To be successful today, every professional must be able to reason well in contexts involving numerical data. A strong score on this scale indicates skill in applying analysis, interpretation, inference, and evaluation to decision contexts where critical numerical information is presented in charts, graphs, text, or tables. Successful business problem solvers demonstrate the ability to interpret and evaluate vital information presented in a variety of numerical formats to reach an optimal problem solution.
• Evaluating Alternatives: The successful professional is capable of evaluating options accurately and establishing priorities. A strong score on this scale indicates strength in the core reasoning skills of evaluation and explanation. The capacity of the professional to differentiate the quality of different possible choices and to explain the reasons behind that evaluation are key to successful problem solving by individuals and teams.

The INSIGHT Defense Professional Report Package includes an individual test-taker report for each person assessed and optional group summary reports for each group and sub-group in the sample.

Reports are generated immediately after the conclusion of testing, making real time assessment possible. Read more about how our customer support specialists work with clients to select their reporting options on our Services tab or contact us for a free consultation.

Individual Reports include:

• Each defense professional mindset attribute is scored on a 40-point scale divided into three qualitative categories (Not Manifested, Positive, Strong Positive).
• The three interactive style characteristics are scored 0 through 40. Scores at the extremes indicate consistent manifestation of that end of the style characteristic spectrum.  Mid-range scores indicate situational awareness and manifestation of both aspects of that interactive characteristic.
• Each reasoning skill metric is scored on a 300-point scale with corresponding qualitative ratings (Not Manifested, Moderate, Strong, and Superior).
• The Individual Reports can be pushed as PDF files to an email address of the client’s choosing (for example, to an HR department hiring officer, a senior manager, or to an external search-firm or professional development consultant). 
• The client controls whether individual reports are made available to the test-taker.
• A short PDF assessment report debrief document to help in understanding scores – it can be distributed by the client to the people who were assessed.

Optional Group Analytics include:

• Excel spreadsheet files of all scores on all metrics. These also include the responses to optional custom demographic questions added by the client to the assessment profile.
• Presentation-ready tables and graphic representations of the score distribution for all metrics.
• Our assessment support staff prepares and emails optional group analytical reports to clients using any of the INSIGHT series assessments.