For a major banking client’s Emerging Talent programme, we sourced, trained and supplied diverse, regional roleplayer teams for assessed development centres in London, Edinburgh, Glasgow and the Midlands. These covered many different parts of the business, including manufacturing, retail, commercial, HR and graduates. Roleplayers were required to play various challenging characters at all levels – direct report, peer to peer, right up to CEO level – allowing participants to show their skills in dealing with a range of situations, all of which were assessed against the client’s competency framework.
For one of these Leadership projects, the requirement was for 130 centres, with 6 role-players needed per centre day. These centres rolled out at a rate of around 5 – 8 per month, often at several locations on the same day across the country. The training of the roleplayer teams was essential to the success of this project, to better gain and maintain consistency of performance in every centre, every venue and every region, allowing candidates an equal chance to show what they could do.
This project was one of several with this client; others had a need for facilitation and feedback sessions, and some just roleplayer teams benchmarking the emerging leader population – but all requiring a high level of monitoring and management throughout long running, nationwide programmes.