on your mark focuses on the needs of 16-23 year olds aiming to help them make the change from education to the world of work. It builds on the premise that self awareness is a necessary first step in the career decision-making process.

To develop this self awareness we use a 360° assessment tool, Belbin Get Set - a tool that identifies an individual’s ways of interacting with other people. What sets Get Set apart from other assessment tools is the use of a minimum of 4 observers to supplement the young person’s self assessment. This is of particular value to young people who may not yet have an accurate view of who they are, how they behave and what they have to contribute to work and other interaction situations.

What is Get Set?
Belbin’s Team Roles, based on a model designed for use in corporations and service organisations, has been adapted for young people aged from 16 to 23 years. Using a self and peer assessment tool, career starters can now discover their preferred ways of working in a team. This provides them with:

What is Belbin’s Team Roles Theory?
The ‘team roles’ concept was developed by Dr Meredith Belbin from research undertaken at Henley Management College and in a range of workplaces around the globe. It is a behavioural analysis which indicates an individual’s preferred styles when working as part of a team.

What are the Team Roles?
This research and consequent field testing identified 9 team roles:
Plant, Completer Finisher, Implementer, Teamworker, Coordinator, Monitor Evaluator, Specialist, Resource Investigator and Shaper.
Each defines distinctive clusters of behaviour and collectively they enable individuals to understand how they work best.

What is the purpose of Team Roles?
The Belbin research project found that teams perform best when they contain a balance of ‘roles’. Individuals who know their team roles can contribute their strengths and other team members can cover their least preferred roles.

While many career tests attempt to define what students should be choosing without giving them any experience of the world of work, Get Set instead seeks to bring out the potential strengths of each individual and relate these to the various challenges that lie beyond the world of education.

Belbin team roles give students and those in the world of work alike a language to talk about their strengths and weaknesses. This language is immensely invaluable because it illustrates abilities without depending on qualifications. Students who take part in a Get Set profile are given a constructive way of presenting their strengths. By providing accurate information about natural team role orientation, young people will be better prepared to make informed decisions at a crucial time in their lives.

How does it work?
The first step is a questionnaire for each student to fill in. This proposes different scenarios, to which the student replies with how they like to behave. They then invite up to 6 of their fellow students, supervisors, teachers or family to answer an observer questionnaire. This is a 5 minute questionnaire completed by ticking relevant adjectives about the student. Both the student's own questionnaire and the observer responses feed into the final profile - a six page personal report. Team reports can also be generated for groups of students, suggesting allocations of roles and tasks.

Get Set for Groups:
While on your mark has been designed primarily for individual facilitation, Get Set profiling, including team reports (see samples), may also be of value in your school’s leadership programme at the early stages of the school year. We would be happy to discuss such applications with you.

Sample Get Set Reports: