Selection
of members for the product design and development team is
quite crucial since company will
depend on their knowledge and skills for many years.
One of the best and most effective ways to evaluate abilities
of designers and engineers is to test them.
Test should be formed as questions and short tasks to
enable evaluation of knowledge, skills and talents.
Good test can depict skills of designers on the existing
team as well, and help the team leader with proper
distribution of various design tasks between designers.
Some design schools use tests for acceptance to the school
and some of those tests expose excellently
knowledge, imagination, creativity and problem solving
skills of the young people. Some of those tasks
are formed similarly the following:
- Use the given paper and adhesive tape to build protection
for an egg that will be dropped on a concrete.
- Use piece of paper to form bridge with a particular length
that can support as much load as possible.
- Use plastic bottle, cork, rope and elastics to build
a toy for a preschool kid.
Those type of tests can show wide range of knowledge and
skills expected from designers and allow for
creative fun during their completion. But they are time
consuming and may look tricky to perform if time
available for an interview is limited and may look not
very serious for some candidates and HR group.
Therefore the other tasks that look more professional are
usually preferred.
Here are samples of the short tests used for evaluation
of knowledge, imagination, creativity and manual
skills of designers. This test has been used additionally
to a verbal interviews of candidates for designers
position and for discovering of skills and knowledge of
the already formed design team as well.
The following sequence of the test questions is not related
to the preferred importance of skills expected
from designers since those expectation can be vary for
different companies of design managers.
A - Spatial imagination with ability to picture objects
from different views and ability to sketch those views
should be the fundamental skills expected from designers.
Therefore given tasks should expose those
skills and understanding of complex 3D geometries by the
designer.
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