Self and Peer Assessments

In support of a lifelong journey of learning, we believe it's important to measure where we're at on a regular basis. As a result, we provide a self/peer-assessment worksheet and summary radar chart that looks something like the following.

We expect people to fill in the worksheet according to the following standards--note that at and above level 3, there is peer vouching.

Contributing doesn't show up here because it's orthogonal--anyone at any level can improve the state of the art.

Sharing Your Survey Results

Start with the skills worksheet (below). Make a Member page for yourself, make a case for why you think you're at level 3 or above for each skill you'd like to claim, and wait for community members to vouch that rating. Then publish your radar chart at the top of your member page.

Ultimately we'd like to automate the generation of the radar chart--but for now you can make one using the attached spreadsheet using Open Office or Excel. Then take a screenshot of the radar chart, save it as a .jpg, upload it as an attachment for your member page, and then Insert Image onto your page.

Agile Self Assessments

Since this is not a certification program, beware that your self assessment will get stale quickly (maybe in 6 months?). Come back often to re-take the survey, and update your charts. We imagine the list of skills will change, as will the format of the report.

Another potential way to visualize this data follows:

In the chart, the large graph represents an individual's overall skill level for each pillar. The farther out the axis, the more skilled the individual is. Each axis would have five values, one for each of the skill levels. Then for each pillar, there can be another graph that breaks down into individual skills within that pillar. (I've shown one example, Product Skills. And the axes of the smaller graph would be labeled with the names of the individual skills (not illustrated).

Any individual could assess him/herself using a chart like this, or an interested party (team lead, recruiter, trainer, coach, ...) could perform this assessment on an individual. To perform the assessment, the 7 small charts would be filled in first. The average skill level from each small chart would be the overall skill level for that pillar in the large chart.