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JIMINY SELF-HELP HANDBOOK 24

from the international experience in the specific groups. As an example, young low-qualified
unemployed have different characteristics from elder workers who were pushed to unemployment
because of advances in automation so they are expected to have some different deficiencies that need
to be addressed accordingly.
The assessment tools and metrics mentioned in the previous part do have an application also with
JIMINY’s focus group of learners but there are things to consider as well. If e.g., the literacy level of a
group is quite low, putting them to written tests and lengthy questionnaires may alienate them further
(because some were probably skeptical in the first place).

Although this is an assessment phase, things work similarly to the validation of competences phase
that will be discussed later in this handbook. We will see there that people who gathered most of their
knowledge during their life and not from formal education feel stressed in a written theoretical test.
For them observation in “real-life conditions” (e.g. a simulation) or unstructured interviews are more
suited and they are more fair.

Furthermore, a series of evaluation tools are not only targeted to more experienced and educated
audiences (e.g. to help an organization pick a frontrunner for a higher position in the hierarchy) but
require extremely experienced and qualified auditors to read and evaluate the results (e.g. a PhD-
carrying psychologist with specialty in EI)

Following the above, structured or unstructured interviews or discussions may prove an easier way to
gather information and find or certify the expected gaps of the targeted group are there and need to
be addressed in the actions phase.
For that task various sets of questions are available from multiple sources, depending on the
experience of the interviewer and how deep he/she needs/wants to go in examining the learner’s
EI/EQ level.

The six questions below were identified by Karla Cook, editor and team manager at HubSpot
Marketing, as some of the best ones to get an indicator of EI/EQ:
1. Can you tell me about a time you tried to do something and failed?
2. Tell me about a time you received negative feedback from your boss. How did that make you
feel?
3. Can you tell me about a conflict at work that made you feel frustrated?
4. Tell me about a hobby you like to do outside of work. Can you teach me about it?
5. What would your co-workers say is the most rewarding thing about working with you? What
about the most challenging thing?
6. Can you tell me about a time you needed to ask for help on a project? (Cook, 2017).

Planning the Interventions
Whatever the techniques we use for assessing the situation and setting the objectives of the
intervention, experience and literature show that addressing key areas like active listening,
understanding expressions and moods, conflict resolution and more, will strongly benefit the targeted
learners of JIMINY. This can help us be proactive in the preparation of the materials and the design of
the activities. Keeping in mind that whatever we design should not be too elaborated, we can also
prepare sets of different levels of difficulty to adjust to the results of the assessment phase.

We can see below excerpts from three types of interventions for EI related topics: