Assigned an assessment at work? What to do first

You do not need to buy anything

You do not need to buy an assessment your organisation has assigned. With a verified account, the assessment appears in your workspace. If you are new, you activate your account from your organisation's invitation and start there.

Your organisation may have assigned the Teacher Development Assessment, the Leadership Development Assessment or both. Before you start, ask who can view your report, and what it is for.

• Existing verified account: sign in and look for the assigned assessment in your workspace.
• New to OTOvios: open the invitation from your organisation and activate your account.
• Stuck: the OTO Assess help pages at https://assess.otovios.com/assess/faq cover getting started.

Plan an uninterrupted hour and answer as you would act

Each assessment is a set of realistic professional situations. The Teacher assessment has 80 scenarios and the Leadership assessment has 96. For each one, you choose how you would act. Around 60 minutes is the guidance for a sitting. It is not a hard deadline.

Your answers save as you go. If your connection drops or you sign out, you can resume where you stopped. Saved answers cannot be revisited, though, so treat each choice as final when you make it.

A gap between lessons is a poor choice, because you will rush the last twenty scenarios. An hour at a desk, with notifications off, works better.

The hardest habit to drop is answering as you think you should. Picture a head of science in her third year. She reads a scenario about a colleague who keeps missing deadlines. The answer that sounds best is a supportive conversation the same day. What she would really do, in a week of mock exams, is send a short email and hope. Choosing the honest answer gives her coach something real to work with.

Ask who will read the report before you begin

Wariness about what an employer sees is common, and reasonable. In 2023 the Information Commissioner's Office published guidance on monitoring workers. Its survey found that 70% of the people it asked would find monitoring at work intrusive.

That survey was about monitoring, not assessment, so it does not describe your situation directly. It does show that most people are uneasy about being watched at work, so it is worth knowing who can see your report. Guarded answers give you a report that is hard to learn from.

Two things are settled. Whether anyone in your organisation can view your report depends on permissions assigned separately. And an organisation's assignment does not give it access to reports you bought privately, or to reports from other organisations. Everything else is worth asking about plainly, before you start.

• Who will be able to view my report, if anyone?
• What will it be used for: coaching, a development plan or something else?
• Will I see my report before anyone discusses it with me?
• Is this part of appraisal, or kept separate from it?

A short email to send before you start

You do not need a meeting for this. A few lines to whoever sent the invitation will do. Something like this works:

"Thanks for assigning the Leadership assessment. Before I start, could you tell me who will be able to view my report, and how we will use it? I would like to answer as openly as I can."

If you are the person sending invitations, answer those questions in the invitation itself. Say which assessment you have assigned, who can view reports and what happens next. Never ask a colleague to buy an assessment you have assigned.

What the report is for, and what it is not

The report describes the evidence from the responses you selected. It sets out strengths, reflection questions and development priorities. The Leadership report adds guidance over short, medium and long-term horizons.

It does not rank you against colleagues, predict how you will perform or diagnose your personality. It does not certify that anyone is ready for headship. If someone proposes using it that way, you have a factual reason to ask what they mean.

The report is most useful in a coaching conversation. There, the choices you made are tested against what you actually did last week. A deputy head whose answers favoured deciding quickly might bring two recent decisions: one made fast and one he wishes he had slowed down. That pair of examples tells his coach more than any single line of the report.