Coaching Assessments: 14 Best Questionnaires and Tests

While your client may have one overarching ambition in mind, a successful coaching program is informed by many objectives.

To measure progress, gauge a client’s interests, and find out what makes them tick, every coach should have at least a few go-to assessments in their arsenal. If you’re looking for new resources to add to your toolkit, or thinking about creating your own, this guide is for you.

Ready to digitalize your own coaching assessments? Get started with Quenza’s $1 trial for 30 days of unlimited access to all the tools you’ll need.

How To Use Coaching Assessment Tools

Coaching is a highly personalized approach to development, and assessments are absolutely vital tools when it comes to shaping a client’s journey and the context in which it occurs.

If you want assessment tools to play a valuable role in the coaching process, you need to choose your tools strategically.

Coaching assessments have a few key uses, both for professionals and for their coachees:[1]

• Help coaches understand their clients, e.g., their traits, interests, needs, strengths, and weaknesses
• Inform initial or ongoing program development, e.g., coaches can share more relevant interventions and resources, or develop a customized coaching program based on their client’s goals
• Facilitate the development of self-awareness in coachees, e.g., by better understanding their internal and external resources
• Enable progress to be monitored, e.g., pre- and post-testing in skills development programs, and
• Although these fall more under the umbrella of ‘evaluation’ rather than assessment, many questionnaires can also help coaches enhance the effectiveness of their interventions and approach.

While there’s no shortage of psychometric scales, feedback forms, and other measurement tools available today, effectively using the insights they can reveal is about understanding what you’ll do with the knowledge.

If you want assessment tools to play a valuable role in the coaching process, that means you need to choose your tools strategically.

10 Popular Assessment Questionnaires

Building on the above list of benefits, here are some of the most common scenarios where different coaching assessments can be valuable:

1. Assessing learning style, needs, strengths, values, or interests: Popular examples include personality type assessments such as the Myers-Briggs Personality Type Assessment (MBTI), VIA Inventory of Strengths (VIA-IS), and motivational assessment engines such as Fingerprint for Success.[2][3]
2. Goal-setting and needs assessments: For instance, life satisfaction assessments that help clients identify key focus areas or training needs assessments for workshops and employee programs
3. Measuring ongoing progress and outcomes: When used regularly throughout a program, tools like the Process Evaluation Scale (PES)[4] can give insight into a client’s progress.

Even with this very short list of well-known psychometric tests, it’s easy to see how versatile assessments can be in a developmental context.

So what are some more specific tools that you can use within your niche?

3 Best Life Coaching Assessments

Life coaching is about empowering clients in their pursuit of greater fulfillment and personal achievement.

This is where tools that measure values, needs, and life satisfaction can be particularly useful—here are a few examples.

1. The Wheel of Life: As shown above, this tool invites clients to rate how satisfied they are with the different domains of their life. Exploring areas such as health, friends, and partner can help coachees identify life domains with low scores and consider actions that might raise their satisfaction in those domains. A customizable digital version of this assessment is available in Quenza’s Expansion Library, or you can create your own version using Quenza’s unique Wheel of Life blank template.
2. Life Domain Satisfaction: This Quenza Expansion also asks coachees to consider their satisfaction with life domains such as money, work, health, family, friends, learning, and partner. Unlike the Wheel of Life, this tool assesses 16 different domains and is available in a classic questionnaire format, as pictured below.
3. Emotion Masks: Here’s a useful emotional intelligence training assessment that can help clients develop more self-awareness. This exercise encourages coachees to think about the emotions that make them feel uncomfortable, and the ways they attempt to disguise those feelings.

4 Tools For Career and Executive Coaching

Emotional intelligence scales are also highly relevant in executive and leadership coaching, alongside strengths assessments, communication style assessments, and tools that measure values.

With today’s organizations placing an increasingly greater emphasis on strengths-based leadership, these types of measures almost always offer valuable insights that help coachees develop new skills and approaches.

With greater insight into their unique assets and development points, career coaching clients can also set goals that are aligned with their needs, and leverage their strengths in pursuit of them.

Depending on your coachee’s goals, the following assessments might be helpful. These Quenza Expansions can be sent as they are through the platform or customized with your own modifications:

1. The Top 5 Values: As shown above, this questionnaire helps clients choose and prioritize their values so that they can focus their time and effort in pursuit of their goals.
2. Strengths During And After Challenging Times: This coaching questionnaire invites coachees to explore the strengths they can leverage to overcome challenging situations, while also facilitating their thought into future uses for these strengths.
3. Finding Your Ikigai: This career coaching tool is designed to help clients discover meaning and purpose in their life by identifying and connecting with their values, skills, and professional opportunities.
4. The Wheel of Needs: With this assessment, you can trigger coachees to think about the unmet needs that may be leading to negative emotional states and preventing them from achieving their goals. This can be an especially useful questionnaire for career changers or clients that are looking for a professional next step.

4 Tests and Quizzes To Send To Clients

As we’ve seen, there’s no shortage of coaching quizzes and tests that can be used in more than one setting.

It’s highly likely the following Expansion questionnaires might be useful to you as they are, or customized to suit your health, mindfulness, or creativity coaching context.

1. Realities That I Am Refusing to Accept: This questionnaire-style exercise can be useful when a client is appraising their reality, especially when it comes to the obstacles in way of their growth. You can use this Quenza Expansion to help them explore how life would be different if you could accept the unchangeable things about their context.
2. Coping Skills and Social Support Inventory: Here’s a useful reflection-style coaching quiz that focuses on how clients have coped with adversity in the past. As a coach, this can give you a good idea of your clients’ social support systems, strengths, and skills, all of which can come in useful as you plan their sessions and program.
3. Monthly Coaching Evaluation: Quenza’s Monthly Coaching Evaluation helps you gauge how a client has been feeling in four important areas of their life. A good tool to use at regular intervals, this instrument assesses their overall perception of their progress and how they experience the sessions.
4. Brief Needs Check-In: The Brief Needs Check-In is a questionnaire and reflection exercise rolled into one. Not only can this tool help you and your client identify patterns in their daily needs, but it can also be used in building a habit of doing so regularly.

How To Easily Send Your Assessments

Once you’ve chosen an appropriate assessment for your client, you can share it directly with them using Quenza’s Client App.

If you’re sending a single Expansion, simply click “Add To My Activities” to create a customizable copy of the template in your Library. Adding an Expansion to your Quenza Library allows you to edit it in your Activity Builder or send it directly to clients.

If you’d like to share it as part of a coaching or training program, you can simply insert it as a step in an existing Pathway using Quenza’s Pathway tools, as we’ve done below.

Using Quenza’s Pathway Tools, you can also specify the intervals at which you’d like each step in your program to be automatically delivered to clients.

Here, we’re scheduling our assessment to be delivered after our client has completed the previous exercise.

Sending Surveys and Assessments with Quenza: An Example

After you send your surveys, your clients are free to complete them in their own time—although you can send them a reminder if they need some motivation!

You’ll be able to track their responses in real-time using Quenza’s life coaching app to view:

• A list of all the assessments you’ve sent, by client (in your Clients tab)
• The completion status of each (Received, Pending, or Completed), and once they’ve filled them out
• Their response(s) to each question.

7 Unique Features Included in Quenza

It’s one thing to send assessments, but sending engaging assessments is a totally different ball game.

With your Quenza subscription, you’ll also find a whole host of features that will help you maximize completion rates and experiment with different use cases:

1. Quenza Groups is a great way to share your assessments with cohorts of up to 50 participants at once
2. With Quenza Notes, you can create private notes during sessions, or even share notes for your clients to comment on
3. Besides assessments, your Expansion Library also includes a huge array of customizable meditations, metaphors, reflections, and other Activities
4. You can provide background, further explanation, or follow-ups to your assessments by sharing multimedia, word, or spreadsheet files with Quenza Files
5. You can answer questions and provide feedback in real-time using Quenza Chat, which is also wonderful for group coaching
6. Using your White Label feature, you can add your coach branding to all your assessment tools, and you can
7. Deliver a seamlessly personalized experience by customizing everything about your client’s app, from their interface language to your professional title.

Final Thoughts

There is a huge array of tests, surveys, and questionnaires out there that can help you at different stages in your programs.

Before you choose or design an instrument for your clients, make sure you clarify exactly what you want to achieve with it. Whether it’s a goal-setting, life satisfaction, or a solid overview of your client’s strengths, a little advance planning will help you create a coaching assessment that’s not just effective, but engaging and motivating, too!

Want to try your hand at crafting a coaching assessment? Unlock your $1 Quenza trial to get started, and enjoy 1 month of full access to all of these templates and more.

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