Police Promotion Information and Resources.
Everything You Need to Know to Plan For
and Achieve Promotion Up the Ranks in Law Enforcement!
Police Promotion Assessment
Center Exercises — How EXACTLY Should You Prepare?
By Lt. Paul Patti (ret) - Director
Police
Career and Promotion Services, LLC.
What you need to know
about all aspects of preparing for and achieving your promotion in
law enforcement can be found in these pages.
About us: I spent 27 years in law enforcement, and since 1985 I have directed an organization that has worked with individuals and agencies in finding and promoting the right people into the higher ranks of police and sheriff's departments. We include a Ph.D. in Personnel Management, as well as a staff attorney focusing on criminal law applications and legal-oriented promotion exams in law enforcement. We specialize not only in writing promotion textbook exams for police agencies, but also written exam preparation for individuals, along with in-basket, oral board and assessment center preparation for both agencies and individual training. Our individual client base of thousands of career law officers has a 99%+ pass rate on their written exams!
More information about me, my organization and affiliates can be found at these links; PoliceCareer.com, About Us, PoliceCareer.net, PolicePromotion.com, Finests.com, In-Basket.net and PoliceAssessmentCenter.com.
Master List of Articles. Questions? Contact me - Paul@PolicePromotion.com
Assessment Center Exercises — Don't Fear — Prepare!
By Lt. Paul Patti (ret.), Director,
Police Career and Promotion Services, LLC — 40+ years of law
enforcement promotion expertise.
If your promotion process includes an assessment center, you are being evaluated differently than in a written exam or oral board. Here is exactly how to approach every type of exercise. Regardless of which of the 6 specific exercises shown below on this page you are facing, you need to be ready to provide thorough answers to each of these 12 questions (not necessarily in this specific order):
1. How do you describe the problem, in specific detail, in your own words?
2. What is your overall goal?
3. How do you describe what your overall strategy will be to solve the issue?
4. Exactly what steps do you need to accomplish on your way to the goal?
5. How and where do you start? Define each preliminary step.
6. Who in your agency or in outside agencies will you need to contact, and when?
7. What tools and resources will you need, and how will you obtain them?
8. What personal experiences will you draw from?
9. What expert training or education will you rely on?
10. Define what "success" will look like. How will you measure it?
11. What are the contingency plans if your solution doesn't work?
12. What specific follow-up will be needed to ensure your actions were effective?
An assessment center for police promotion is a very powerful tool for police managers to make promotional decisions using a series of simulated on-the-job challenges to gauge a candidate's ability to perform the target rank and position.
Individual and group job simulations offer in-depth information on an individual's strengths, weaknesses, and overall performance potential. The performance of candidates is evaluated by trained assessors, providing information unattainable from written tests, interviews, or any other source.
Assessment centers measure specific, pre-defined dimensions or competencies. Research from the Department of Justice identified six core dimensions most commonly scored: technical knowledge, interpersonal skills, writing skills, verbal skills, analytic/problem-solving skills, and versatility. A seventh dimension — group appraisal — is often added at the conclusion of multi-exercise centers.
A brilliant analogy from Police1 and Finests.com captures the psychology of assessment center preparation better than almost anything else in the literature: The rating forms and assessor notes are your targets. When you are qualifying, you get a high score by repeatedly hitting the ten ring.
In your assessment center, assessors keep track of your demonstrations of competencies and whether you got a solid hit or not. The most important aspect of qualification is having ammunition — knowing what the competencies are, and having practiced responses ready to demonstrate them.
Candidates are awarded points by assessors who must hear something that demonstrates positive performance, and can lose points if they hear something inappropriate. Therefore, candidates must find out as much as possible about the assessment exercises they will be taking and study the appropriate sections.
The Six Major Exercise Types — What Each Tests and How to Prepare
1. The In-Basket Exercise
This is considered the most common and often most intimidating component. It tests organization skills, delegation skills, and most importantly judgment under time pressure.
An estimated quarter of candidates fail it their first time for one reason: they didn't prepare. See our specific In-Basket overview page as well as In-Basket.net for specific preparation tips.
2. The Role-Play Exercise
The role-play exercise is a type of assessment center exercise where the candidate assumes the role of the incumbent of the position (e.g., Sergeant) and must deal with another person in a job-related situation. A trained role player responds "in character" to the candidate's actions. Role-play exercises typically measure problem solving and analysis, interpersonal dynamics, and communications. Common scenarios include counseling a problem employee, handling a citizen complaint, mediating a conflict between officers, or addressing an officer's performance issue.
Key preparation advice: the role-play is not about winning an argument or achieving a specific outcome. It is about demonstrating how you, as a supervisor, would handle a real situation — your process, your communication skills, your fairness, and your judgment. Knowing what to do is not enough. You must be able to demonstrate it convincingly in real time.
3. The Leaderless Group Discussion (LGD)
The leaderless group discussion exercise involves a group of candidates meeting to discuss an actual job-related problem without a designated leader.
Through discussion, candidates attempt to reach consensus on a solution within a set time limit. Candidates display their willingness and ability to organize and process information, personally influence others, listen to other ideas, and negotiate a workable solution.
Assessors observe and evaluate candidate behavior in this group setting — including who takes initiative, who listens, who builds consensus, and who bulldozes or dominates. Dimensions typically measured are leadership, problem solving and analysis, and interpersonal dynamics.
Preparation tip: the LGD does not reward the loudest voice in the room. It rewards the candidate who helps move the group toward a workable solution — listening, building on others' ideas, redirecting unproductive conversations, and summarizing consensus. Assessors are watching for collaborative leadership, not dominance.
4. The Oral Presentation Exercise
The oral presentation exercise gives assessors an opportunity to observe and evaluate a candidate's ability to present ideas or tasks to an individual or group, with or without preparation.The candidate's use of non-verbal communication is also observed and evaluated. By choosing a relevant topic, assessors are provided an opportunity to evaluate the candidate's knowledge.
One common format — the graphic biography — asks the candidate to present a 5-minute PowerPoint on their own career background and qualifications, prepared in advance.
For the most comprehensive advice available on police promotional oral board exercises and the specific preparation needed, visit Finests.com, and seek the expert advice of Asst. Chief Bill Reilly (ret) from Hartford CT PD.
5. The Problem Analysis (PA) Oral Presentation
A deeper version of the oral presentation, the PA exercise gives the candidate a real or simulated law enforcement problem — a crime trend, a staffing challenge, a community relations issue — and asks them to analyze it and present a solution.
This tests analytical thinking, planning, prioritization, and verbal communication simultaneously. Dr. Linsey Willis's book Mastering the Assessment Center Process covers this specifically in Chapter 10.
6. The Video-Based Test (VBT) and Situational Judgment Test (SJT)
This is a newer format increasingly used by agencies — the candidate watches video scenarios of real or simulated law enforcement situations and is scored on their responses or judgments.
The SJT asks candidates to choose among several responses to a described situation, scored against what subject matter experts have determined are the best responses. Both formats test judgment and decision-making rather than knowledge recall.
The Psychological Side —
Demystifying What Assessors Are Actually Doing
Most candidates fear the assessment center because it feels opaque and subjective. The reality is the opposite — assessment centers are among the most structured and objectively scored evaluation methods in existence.
Several key demystifying points:
- Assessors are trained observers following specific scoring guides, not making subjective impressions
- Every assessor records behavioral observations in real time — they are not going on gut feeling
- Multiple assessors compare notes and reach consensus scores — reducing individual bias
- The dimensions being measured are determined in advance by a job analysis — they are not arbitrary
- Candidates who study the dimensions and practice demonstrating them have a measurable advantage
Our affiliated resource LJCraig.com states it directly: learn how assessment center skill dimensions and consensus ratings should be determined by the assessors. That knowledge transforms the assessment center from an intimidating black box into a scoreable, practice-able performance.
The assessment center is not designed to trick you. It is designed to find the best supervisor in the room. With the right preparation, that can be you!
Some short articles and in-depth material needed to further understand these topics;
IACP — Testing & Assessment Centers
LJCraig.com — Promotional Coaching Including Assessment Centers
Charles C. Thomas — Mastering the Assessment Center Process (Dr. Willis)
OJP — Oral Assessment Exercises
OJP — Written Assessment Exercises
OJP — Predictive Validity of Assessment Centers
Ure Consulting Group — Assessment Center Exercise Types
OACP — Assessment Center Exercise Menu (PDF)
Police1 — Assessment Center Preparation (Shooting Range Analogy)
Master list of articles and resources: from PolicePromotion.net
Your Police Promotion Timeline — When Should
Preparation Begin?
Field Training — Your First Defining Chapter
Building Your Promotional Reputation Over Time
Recordkeeping —
Your Evaluations, and Training Documentation
The Two Tracks —
Supervision vs. Specialization
The Role of College Education
in Law Enforcement
The FTO As an Early Promotion Credential
The Written Promotional
Exam — What It Covers and How to Prepare
The Oral Board — the
Promotion First-Timer's Biggest Challenge
The In-Basket Exercise
— NOT as
Easy as You Think!
Assessment Center Exercises
—
Don't Fear — Prepare!
Making it To The Top — Or — How High is
High Enough?
When it's Time to Leave it All Behind — And What to
do Next.Do You REALLY Want the Promotion? — Links to help you prepare for:
Police Corporal
Police Detective
Police Sergeant
Police Lieutenant
Police Captain
Police
Administration and Upper Management
Understanding Police Leadership Concepts
Understanding Police Ethical Considerations
Understanding Police
Patrol and Field Operations
Understanding Community
and Problem-Oriented Policing
Understanding Intelligence-Led Policing
Police Case Law
Application with Case Law Pro