GKN Aerospace is one of the world's leading engineering manufacturers. Founded more than 250 years ago as Guest, Keen and Nettlefolds, the company can even trace its roots to the birth of the Industrial Revolution. 

Due to an aggressive growth strategy, GKN wanted a process that could assess the capability and potential of a critical management population who would feed into future resourcing demands. 

The process had to be one of integrity and rigour, able to be executed on a global basis, and it needed to come with a consistent calibration of assessment. 

The participant output needed to contain a potential recommendation, provide a rating system against GKN's competency framework, and be developmental. 

After a successful proposal, we undertook a number of workshops with key stakeholders. This was to understand challenges, identify critical competencies, behaviours, organisational culture and create engagement with the overall process. 

From this, we designed a half-day development centre. This involved senior GKN leaders acting as coaches to the participants during and after the centre.

Following a successful pilot, the first centres took place in the USA and UK in the spring of 2010. Since then, we've assessed more nearly 250 participants. In 2012 we undertook two centres in China. And for the first time in July 2013, we rolled out the solution and have now delivered two centres in India.