Frequently Asked Questions

Who are Academy28?

Academy28 offers a rapid online behavioural preferences tool, linked to everyday practical business challenges, together with a unique tool to enable trainers to match their delivery style with the learning styles of their audiences. We also offer a full range of webinar support and virtual training programme development services.

What is Your Preferences?

Your Preferences is an online portfolio of tools allowing you to assess your own development, likely behaviours, and interaction with others in a team situation. It enables a team leader to gather together the members of a group, initiate reports on their preferred behaviour, and build up a group profile. As well as using personality type testing (link to below) to analyse individuals, Your Preferences provides questionnaires and reports to allow you to see how a team is performing, what’s going right and wrong, and how it could be improved.

Sign up now to open your account with Your Preferences, and take advantage of our expertise on the subject of personal and group development. Registering only takes a couple of minutes, and the use of our basic tools is absolutely free.

What is personality type?

At e-coaches, we know as well as you do that no one can be pigeon-holed; we’re all flexible human beings, not two-dimensional stereotypes! Analysing your personality type simply allows you to see ways in which you might prefer to behave. Generally quite organised, or more laid back? Prefer to fire off an email, or track your colleagues down? Type testing uses simple methods to assess preferred behaviour in various situations, on four scales. Two different choices on each scale gives sixteen distinct personality ‘types’.

What can a personality type test tell me?

A personality type test uses your choices between simple options to build up a broad picture of how you are likely to perform in any given situation. It thus takes relatively simple data — yes/no answers, easy decisions — to construct a more complex picture of likely behaviours and preferences. In each individual case, information may seem trivial; when applied as a whole, it can provide a powerful overview of character, and a good indication of likely behaviour in a team.

What can’t a personality type test tell me?

As it’s based on a reasonably limited number of choices, and an individual is under no obligation to choose in a ‘fair’ or ‘accurate’ way, a personality type test is not a foolproof analysis of a person’s character. Also, especially if an individual’s on the borderline between two different answers, a personality type test may well give different results on separate occasions.

Most importantly, a personality type test is not an indicator of aptitude. Just because an individual may prefer to do things in a certain way, it does not mean that s/he is any less able to perform a certain task than someone with a different personality type test result. Tests like this can only be used as an indicator of likely behaviours and interactions, not respective abilities.

How does the Your Preferences site work?

The Your Preferences site is based around reports and tests that analyse likely behaviours, especially in relation to others. Once you register, you’ll be able to manage these reports from your own account. This is also where you can be invited to join a team — a team of colleagues, for instance.

What is the Dashboard?

The Dashboard is the hub of your Your Preferences account. This is the page at which you’ll arrive every time you log in to Your Preferences; it’ll have details of the reports you’ve taken, analyses you’ve generated, and groups you’ve joined, as well as any other information from around the site.

What are the Reports?

The Your Preferences Reports provide information on your preferred behaviours, to allow you — and anyone who interacts with you in a team situation — to analyse how you are likely to behave in a group environment. The Reports section of the site is also where you’ll go to take questionnaires on team performance for the benefit of your team and your team leader — invitations to do so will be sent to your account’s Dashboard by your leader or manager.

What can I do with the information?

The information in the Your Preferences reports is designed to be applicable in a wide range of situations: it’s up to you where and how you use what you learn, here! One of the most important functions of the site is the ability to establish professional networks with other people, online, and the possibilities for a team leader to work with the pool of information generated.

I’m a team leader; what can Your Preferences do for me?

For you as a team leader, the Your Preferences site provides a unique overview of the many different behaviours, preferences, and working styles of the colleagues under your command. Invite team members to take personality type tests; generate reports of likely team interactions, and plan your work accordingly; monitor performance using a ‘team health check’: how you use the site is up to you, and your team.