Psychometric Testing
 

Hi Folks. Long time reader, first time poster.

I'm after some info regarding psychometric testing, specifically for Qlink stage two. And yes, I have been through the Qlink thread. :ok: Does anyone know of any helpful websites / books to help prepare. Also, any info or experiences with available courses would be appreciated. PMs welcome.
Cheers!

Psychometric tests determine the suitability of your character for a career.

Police forces use Psychometric testing to test for empathy. If you have empathy you won't have a career in the force. Empathy is counterproductive to a satisfying career in the Police.

Psychometric testing is hard to study for. You are asked the same question in numerous different ways several times in the testing. It's hard to be consistent if you're"faking" (or misrepresenting) your answers.

As one of my pervious managers told me before my (successful test) , be honest in the test, after all if you're not suited to the role, aren't you better persuing another career?

'gil' I guess yr advice is correct for today's environment but well before some Uni guru dreamed up the Psycho crap many a pilot applied, got thru due skill & lead a long & successful career as a commercial pilot.

Shame Co's tend to look for someone else other than a pilot within a pilot.

Flying the plane is the easy bit these days after all it's only a skill much like a trade but as for the peripheral crap?.............well it's a game of deception as I've seen a few pilots over the latter years that I scratch my head as to how they ever got thru that so called 'net' to filter out such personalities.
You don't need to be a good pilot anymore ya just gotta know how to play the game:-)

I've never had to do one of those silly tests thank God otherwise I'd still be on the ground so good luck HF55 hope ya bluff 'em!:-)

Wmk2

Cheers wmk2. Hopefully I can bluff them just enough to get through!

gileraguy - I agree it is difficult to study for, particularly the motivational and personality questionnaire. Though Qlink stage two also includes Numerical and Verbal reasoning questions which I think you can definitely improve by putting in a bit of study.

That is absolutely true Wally. And I have had RPT pilots in my care who have been great FOs and totally psycho Captains; I have seen Check & Training captains whose students qualified despite their instructor; I have seen pilots with a pathological inability to play by the rules rise and rise in their career because they were the one who got the job done.

Right up until he flew into a hill.

I think you would agree that there are some personalities that are better suited to single-pilot work and some better suited to multi-crew. In a small operation you can ill-afford that wrong person who can take down the morale of the whole base, or the whole pilot body.

The psych testing I have used was very very accurate and very descriptive of a person's character. We got all the Captains to participate in a validation study and it was very useful then as a recruitment tool, allowing us to identify the more desirable character traits in an applicant and to red-flag a very few.

The psych tests were only one tool in the selection process and an applicant with zero technical aptitude or bad referees would still get zapped. It did help avoid hiring a total charmer who turned out to be a psycho.

As said above, you can't study for psychometric testing. The questions are designed in such a way that they will get an answer to what they are after by asking you several different questions that apply to the same topic. Unless you are willing (or even able) to go back and change previous answers, you won't fool the test or the reviewers of the test.
Just answer truthfully and you'll be very surprised after you've seen the results, if you are allowed to. The two psychometric tests I've done have hit my personality/beliefs/abilities right on the head...and they STILL hired me!:}
Management will only use it to weed out sociopaths and possibly determine your career path in the future if the test shows you may excel in a certain situation etc.

Despite the commonly held belief to the contrary, you can in fact study for and fool a psychometric test. However it does take a rather large investment in time and emotion.

Psychometric tests were designed to be used as a tool by a trained psychologist in conjunction with a face to face interview. These days, due to the stingy nature of airline recruitment departments the psychometric tests are interpreted by a computer program and the subsequent interview carried out by a HR person whom often have no real background in psychology and often simply use pro-forma type questions to tick boxes. These are the easiest tests to fool.

Fooling a psych test is like fooling a lie detector test - if you truly believe that you are telling the truth then your answers won't spike to indicated a lie. So it is with a psychometric test. You need to be the personality that the specific test is looking for and you need to carry that off for the duration of the test and any subsequent psychologist interview. You need to understand the specific psych profile down to the finest detail. It may be that you know someone who strongly exhibits this profile, you further study this profile from every source that you can find and put yourself in those shoes when giving an answer.

Seriously the psychology breadth of field that we are talking about here is not great. Broadly speaking, the tester will try to pigeon hole you in one of six or so profiles and then ask some pretty basic (canned) questions to back that up. With a bit of study you can know the intent and correct response to a psych question before the interviewer has even finished asking. The trick then is to remember to leave a thoughtful pause before responding.

Then again you can just be brutally honest. You might be surprised to find that you're exactly what they're looking for.