i WAM – can you? from Paul Stewart

I have just completed the two day training course for iWAM, and survived! In fact, I found it completely fascinating and fully intend to complete the accreditation process and to use it in real life. iWAM stands for internet Work, Attitude and Motivation questionnaire. In simple terms iWAM is the most up to date psychometric testing currently on the market. The reports are applicable to recruitment and coaching, and can be used with individuals, pairs, teams and for organisations.

I am a fledgling coach and was on the course looking to find out what the latest testing had to offer, I have had some experience with Jungian Based psychometric tests and wanted to find out what the new boy on the block has to offer.

iWAM is based on the work of Patrick Merlevede, a scientist, business consultant and an expert in Cognitive Behaviour. This unique profiling tool can be used for assessment but it is rather labour intensive if you want to write up reports for feeding it back. The iWAM assessment can be completed on line in about 20-30 minutes and the reports produced within an hour of completion.

The LAB Profile is the based on Metaprograms which are the series of mental filters which determine how people behave, based on how they think and what they pay attention to in a given situation. I do not have the time to cover this in detail here, suffice to say it is very complex and has a lot to the with the inner workings of the mind. The course was a steep learning curve for me because some of the material is related to NLP which I have only a passing knowledge of, but the trainers made sure that I was kept up to speed and didn’t miss out on anything.

Sally and David, who gave the training, are both vastly experienced and extremely well qualified. The training was superb, when difficult concepts came up, Sally and David always had an appropriate example or analogy to bring the concepts to life. Questions were encouraged and the practical exercises very useful and relevant.

The group, myself excluded, were all veteran HR managers and coaches. The consensus was that the reports were extremely accurate. It was strongly emphasised that the reports also highly contextual, meaning that they applied to the candidates work situation, not how they are at home or when out with friends. We had plenty of practice feeding back the reports to each other. The reports were very detailed and quite different to the Jungian based DISC reports of which I have had previous experience.

From a coaching point of view it was clear that the iWAM starts where DISC reports left off because they cover attitude and motivation far more than behaviour. The discussions I had when feeding back the report to my partner were quite intense but in a really good lets-get-down-to-business sort of way. The HR consultants among us felt much the same thing; that it would be really useful in getting under the surface of things very quickly.

In conclusion I would thoroughly recommend iWAM as a psychometric assessment tool whether or not you have experience with Jungian based assessment tools as it covers completely new ground regarding attitude and motivation. Like any new skill you will need to put the practice in to get the most out of it, but you will be rewarded with very rich and deep coaching and development conversations. I can’t wait to go back and moved to the more advanced user modules