About the Author

Lawrence R. O’Leary, Ph. D.

Dr. O’Leary has spent over twenty-five years of his professional career developing, and implementing selection and promotional processes within Fire/Rescue Departments across the country. Most of these processes include assessment centers, emergency scenes and interviews. He develops the exercises and trains the assessors from fire/rescue departments in more than thirty-five cities across the United States and Canada in order to implement assessment centers in dozens of fire/service departments from such cities as Akron, OH, Birmingham, AB, Little Rock, AR, Miami, FL, St. Louis, MO, Washington, DC and a number of others. As a result of creating and implementing these assessment centers and training the assessors how to observe and evaluate thousands of candidates for promotion, he created a training tool that will prepare you for promotion, within the fire/rescue service. The Kit answers basic questions about the assessment center method and provides you with actual assessment center exercises for you to examine, participate in and score. This allows you the opportunity to not only become familiar with many aspects of the process such as identifying what are the assessors looking for but also actually practice performing on a number of actual assessment center exercises, prior to your participation in your assessment center. During this extended time, he has collected and identified specific behaviors that generate positive scores in fire/rescue assessment centers as well as the types of behavior that generated negative scores. Dr. O’Leary wants to put these experiences at your disposal in the form of a book that describes the basic process of the fire/rescue promotional assessment center. In addition he has three basic exercises for you to practice be before you attend your promotional assessment center. In summary this kit tears away the curtain of misconceptions about the fire/rescue assessment center by providing a simply written and comprehensive set of basic facts about the process from an experienced practitioner. Finally, it affords the purchaser of the Kit the opportunity to practice participating in actual assessment center exercises, receive feedback about their performance on some of the exercises by using the enclosed scoring guides and do so in a calm and relaxed setting before they attend their promotional assessment center.