A workplace assessment is a psychological assessment undertaken by an individual for the purpose of being able to describe, predict, explain and make decisions about that individual.

Psychological assessments are instruments, or tools, which seek to make justifiable and verifiable predictions about people in a scientific and objective way. They can take a measured or a non-measured approach.
(Coaley 2012)

The diagram below, adapted from Coaley (2012), is a taxonomy of psychological methods used in workplace assessment.

Psychological assessments have emerged from the psychology of individual differences. They seek to describe the ways in which people are different, as well as understanding how and why such differences occur (Coaley 2012). We will look at the different methods of workplace assessment later on in the course.