The professor discusses research he and Honors Fellow have done in designing a system to help prepare students for success in their first post-graduate jobs.
Chris Leupold, Isabella Cannon Professor of Leadership and associate professor of psychology, presented at the Experiential Learning Leadership Institute’s annual conference in Flagstaff, Arizona, on June 26.
The title of the presentation was “Developing servant leaders: Creating an assessment center for entry-level professionals,” and was co-authored by rising senior psychology major and Honors Fellow Betsy Albritton.
The presentation outlined the research that the pair has completed thus far in their creation of a comprehensive assessment and development system designed to help students as they prepare to begin their professional careers. More specifically, Leupold and Albritton are developing an assessment center, which is a collection of realistic and standardized simulations designed to assess the competencies deemed most important for a given job level.
Assessment centers are widely employed by Fortune 500 companies to help high-level professionals gain insights into their job-related strengths and weaknesses, as well as to help human resource departments make succession planning and other personnel decisions. Leupold’s and Albritton’s project is undertaking the same process of building a research-grounded assessment center but are designing it specifically for college students preparing to enter the workforce. Their aim is to pilot their assessment center in Fall 2018.
Leupold also serves as the executive leadership coach in residence at Elon’s School of Law.
The Experiential Learning Leadership Institute is an organization dedicated to educating leaders in higher education, K-12, and non-profit organizations on experiential and project-based learning (https://www.suu.edu/siel/elli/).