Assessment Training
Sharpen Your Skills. Expand Your Tools. Maximize Your CE Hours
Building Competency With Confidence
While graduate education provides the foundation, most clinicians enter the field with limited experience applying assessment or integrating new modalities into real-world practice. The APA’s Guidelines for Clinical Supervision in Health Service Psychology and Competency Benchmarks emphasize lifelong learning, self-assessment, and the ethical responsibility to practice within one’s scope—yet few structures exist to support clinicians in expanding that scope once formal training ends.
Finding reliable, high-quality guidance for beginning a new intervention, adopting a new population, or working with complex diagnostic tools is notoriously difficult. Practitioners are often left choosing between expensive continuing education courses that lack clinical depth or trial-and-error learning in isolation.
This service aims to fill that gap. The main focus of the training is on applied competency and clinical utility, ensuring that clinicians gain practical skills and confidence for real-world application.
These consultation-based trainings are designed to support clinicians in building applied competency in specific areas of practice. Each session blends instruction with conceptual discussion and real case-based application. The goal is simple: to help you work with greater clarity, confidence, and clinical precision as your practice evolves.
Testimonials
Greg T
"I’ve taken plenty of CE courses, but this was something else. Cody’s training didn’t just teach me how to interpret tests—it changed the way I think about assessment altogether. I left with an integrated process that brings my clients into the work, rather than pushing them away. The soft assessment techniques were a revelation. It’s the first time assessment has actually deepened the therapeutic alliance for me"
Jesse W
"This was exactly what I needed to finally bring assessment into my therapy work. I had touched the NEO and BSI in grad school, but never knew how to actually use them with clients. Cody made the process clear, relevant, and clinical—never academic for its own sake. The training gave me tools I now use every week, and my case formulations are sharper and more collaborative because of it."
Rachael G
"The consultation-based format was incredibly refreshing. It wasn’t just a lecture—I got to bring in my real cases, ask specific questions, and get practical help in real time. Cody struck the perfect balance between technical expertise and therapeutic insight. I left feeling more competent, more confident, and honestly more connected to the heart of why I do this work."
Assessment Training Disclaimer
This training focuses on building clinical competency in interpreting assessment data, integrating results into case formulations, and using findings within a collaborative, therapy-aligned model. It is intended for clinicians who already have legitimate access to the assessment tools they plan to use.
Accessing test materials is straightforward and supportive—publishers review credentials quickly and make most Level B and Level C tools available to any clinician with an appropriate graduate degree. Administrative competency (standardized administration, scoring, and authorized use) comes directly from the clinical manuals provided by the test publishers linked below. This training does not supply copyrighted materials, scoring keys, stimulus content, or expanded testing privileges. All test use must remain consistent with ethical standards, scope-of-practice laws, HIPAA requirements, and publisher policies.
The purpose of this training is to make assessment clearer, more useful, and more accessible—supporting stronger formulation, diagnostic differentiation, and treatment integration as your practice grows.
Theory to Practice Introduction to Assessment
Start using psychological assessments to inform treatment—without the overwhelm. This package offers a hands-on introduction to three foundational tools that can immediately strengthen how you understand your clients, structure interventions, and track meaningful progress. These foundational tools include self report questionnaires, which are designed to capture client data directly and inform clinical decision-making. The measures are intentionally selected for their clinical utility, affordability, and ease of integration—ideal for therapists ready to move beyond intuition alone without getting lost in complexity.
Introductory Battery
Most therapy is guided by intuition, experience, and the therapeutic relationship—and for good reason. Assessment can take various forms, from structured questionnaires to qualitative interviews, each offering unique insights. But when clinical judgment is supported by well-integrated assessment data, treatment becomes sharper, more targeted, and often more effective. This training introduces three tools—the NEO, BSI/SCL-90-R, and QOLI—that elevate your work without overcomplicating it. You’ll learn how to use them not as diagnostic requirements, but as instruments for precision: refining case conceptualizations, tracking real change, and grounding your insights in something more structured than clinical instinct alone. These tools don’t replace good therapy—they make it deeper, more sophisticated, and more responsive to the complexity of your clients. If you’re looking to move beyond talk alone, this is where you start.
Highlights:
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Learn how to interpret the NEO, BSI/SCL-90-R, and QOLI through a therapy-first lens
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Create integrated formulations that blend symptom, structure, and life satisfaction
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Identify markers of change that support deeper therapeutic goals
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Use assessment to build—not break—the therapeutic alliance
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Deliver feedback that promotes insight, engagement, and real-world change
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Develop a foundation in collaborative assessment without needing formal certification
Who It’s For
This package is ideal for therapists who:
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Want to start using assessment in treatment but don’t know where to begin
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Learned these tools in graduate school but never used them clinically
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Are looking to anchor their intuition in structured, effective data
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Prefer clarity over jargon—and care about making assessment useful
Advanced Collaborative Assessment Training
From Test Battery to Therapeutic Transformation
This training prepares you to deliver collaborative assessment as a fully autonomous, short-term clinical intervention—where testing itself becomes a transformative process. Advanced assessment training enables clinicians to navigate complex diagnostic categories with greater confidence and precision. Building on the introductory training, it goes deeper into nuance, interpretation, and clinical meaning. You’ll learn how to guide clients through a dialogic structure that surfaces story, conflict, and growth potential—enriching ongoing therapy or standing alone as treatment. This model elevates assessment into a therapeutic encounter: relational, precise, and insight-driven.
Full Collaborative Assessment Battery
NEO + PAI (Personality Assessment Inventory)
A powerful combination of trait-based and clinical measures, the PAI includes validity scales to assess response consistency and test-taking approach, ensuring accurate and reliable results. Together, they create a clinically rich, norm-referenced profile that helps you map emotional regulation, interpersonal style, and diagnostic clarity with depth and precision.
QOLI (Quality of Life Inventory)
A strengths-based tool that evaluates satisfaction across life domains—taking into account what a person expects from each area of their life—allowing you to center the client’s values, balance symptom relief with purpose, and create plans that move beyond pathology toward a more engaged, meaningful, and personally fulfilling life.
WAIS-V (Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale)
A comprehensive cognitive measure that reveals not just intellectual functioning, but how clients approach problems, sustain effort, and respond under pressure—providing insight into executive function, processing style, and real-world application. The WAIS-V can also be used to track cognitive changes over a long period.
BSI or SCL-90-R
Brief, standardized screeners that capture psychological distress with clarity—widely used to screen for various mental disorders—helping you prioritize treatment targets, track clinical severity, and articulate change over time, especially when clients have difficulty identifying or communicating what feels wrong.
TAT (Thematic Apreception test)
A projective storytelling tool that gives access to unconscious themes, relational templates, and inner conflicts—helping to uncover significant patterns and relationships in a person's life—bringing emotional depth and symbolic richness to your assessment while opening powerful therapeutic dialogue through narrative material.
Curated Soft Assessment Battery
Non-standardized, client-engaging tools that capture dynamic in-session material—revealing patterns, resistance, meaning, and symbolic content that deepen rapport and enrich formal results with nuance, context, and psychological texture.
What separates competent assessment from transformative assessment isn’t the number of tools used—it’s how well they’re woven together. This section is designed for clinicians who want to move past formulaic interpretation and into the kind of integrative thinking that reveals complexity, contradiction, and core psychological truths. This approach allows clinicians to consider different constructs that shape client experience and behavior. If you’ve ever sensed that your assessments were accurate but somehow incomplete, this is where you learn to close that gap—with nuance, cohesion, and clinical authority.
Integration: How to Use These Tools Together
Testing is most powerful when it’s not siloed. There are numerous ways to integrate findings from different assessment tools to create a comprehensive clinical picture. This training emphasizes how to integrate data across multiple sources to build a formulation that’s dynamic, not fragmented.
You’ll learn how to:
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Compare structural and symptomatic profiles across tools
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Resolve contradictions and highlight converging patterns
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Use projective material (e.g., TAT) to bring life to objective results
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Balance strengths and vulnerabilities in treatment formulation
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Match tools to clinical questions—not the other way around
We’ll also cover how to translate assessment findings into working treatment plans—using results to inform interventions, track change over time, and communicate more clearly with clients and other providers.
Incorporating Soft Assessments in a Therapeutic Testing Space
Not all meaningful data comes from formal tools. You’ll also learn how to incorporate soft assessments—brief drawing tasks, sentence stems, observational themes, symbolic behaviors, and subtle in-room reactions—to add richness and therapeutic engagement to the assessment process.
These soft methods can:
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Deepen rapport and lower resistance during testing
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Add qualitative texture to structured findings
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Give voice to parts of the client that may not emerge through standardized formats
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Bridge the gap between testing and the therapy relationship
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Help identify patterns related to addictive behaviors that may not be captured by formal tools
When used skillfully, soft assessments don’t just support testing—they make it feel like part of the therapy.
Intro To Theory
In a collaborative assessment framework, theory is never abstract—it is the lens through which client experience becomes understandable, coherent, and therapeutically useful. Collaborative assessment treats every test response, narrative, and behavioral pattern as a window into how a client organizes meaning. The goal is not to diagnose from a distance but to enter into the client’s interpretive world with them, using data to illuminate the structures, themes, and expectations that shape their lived experience. The theories outlined below—cognitive theory, personal construct theory, and interpersonal skill development—provide the conceptual backbone for this process. They help explain how clients think, predict, perceive, and relate, and they guide the clinician in turning assessment findings into insight, dialogue, and effective intervention. These frameworks allow collaborative assessment to move beyond scores and into shared understanding, making theory a practical tool for therapeutic change.
Cognitive Theory
Cognitive theory stands as a cornerstone in modern psychology, offering a powerful lens for understanding human behavior and personality. At its core, cognitive theory explores how mental processes—such as perception, memory, attention, language, and problem-solving—shape the way individuals interpret and respond to the world around them. Rather than viewing behavior as a simple reaction to external stimuli, cognitive theory emphasizes the importance of internal mental representations and cognitive processes in guiding thoughts, feelings, and actions.
This framework has given rise to influential models like social cognitive theory, personal construct theory, and social learning theory. Social cognitive theory, for example, highlights how people learn not only through direct experience but also by observing others—a process known as observational learning. It also introduces the concept of self-efficacy, or the belief in one’s ability to achieve a desired outcome, as a key driver of motivation and behavior change. Personal construct theory, meanwhile, focuses on the unique cognitive categories each person uses to make sense of their experiences, underscoring the individuality of human personality. Social learning theory bridges these ideas, showing how cognitive factors and social environment interact to influence learning and the adoption of new behaviors.
By integrating cognitive theory into assessment and intervention, clinicians can better understand the complex interplay between thought patterns, learning, and behavior. This approach not only enriches personality assessment but also supports the development of healthier behaviors and more effective therapeutic strategies.
Personal Construct Theory
Personal construct theory, developed by American psychologist George Kelly, offers a unique cognitive approach to understanding human behavior and personality. According to this theory, each person organizes their experiences through a set of personal constructs—mental categories or templates that help them interpret and anticipate future events. These constructs are highly individualized, reflecting the person’s unique history, expectations, and worldview.
In clinical psychology, personal construct theory provides valuable insight into how individuals with mental health challenges, such as anxiety disorders or borderline features, perceive and respond to their environment. For example, someone struggling with anxiety may interpret ambiguous situations as threatening due to their underlying constructs, which in turn shapes their emotional and behavioral responses. The Personality Assessment Inventory (PAI) is an important measure that can help clinicians assess these personal constructs, identifying patterns related to suicidal ideation, personality disorders, or other areas of concern.
By understanding a client’s personal constructs, clinicians can tailor interventions to address maladaptive patterns and promote healthier ways of thinking and relating. This approach not only deepens the assessment process but also supports more personalized and effective treatment planning, helping individuals move toward greater psychological flexibility and well-being.
Interpersonal Skills
Interpersonal skills are the foundation of effective communication and relationship-building, both in personal life and professional settings. These skills encompass the ability to form and maintain relationships, navigate social environments, resolve conflicts, and express oneself clearly and empathetically. From a cognitive theory perspective, interpersonal skills are shaped by the way individuals process social information, interpret cues, and learn from their interactions with others.
Social cognitive theory sheds light on how people develop interpersonal skills through observational learning—watching and modeling the behaviors of family members, peers, or mentors. Cognitive factors such as self-efficacy and mental representation also play a role, influencing how confident a person feels in social situations and how they expect others to respond.
In clinical psychology, assessing interpersonal skills is crucial for understanding risk factors and treatment needs, especially in clients with anxiety related disorders, substance use issues, or antisocial features. The Personality Assessment Inventory (PAI) includes interpersonal scales that evaluate a person’s ability to connect with others, manage conflict, and maintain healthy boundaries. These insights can inform treatment consideration scales, guiding clinicians in developing targeted interventions that address both relational challenges and underlying mental health concerns.
By focusing on interpersonal skills within the assessment process, clinicians can help clients build stronger, more supportive relationships—an essential step toward improved mental health and overall well-being.
FAQ
Format & Structure
Each training begins with a collaborative review of your current level of competency, experience, and clinical goals. Together, we identify the skills you want to strengthen and build a plan that matches the depth and direction of your practice.
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60–75 minute sessions – available as one-time consults or an ongoing series
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Initial planning discussion – to assess your current skill level and clarify training goals
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Customized scope of training – tailored to your needs, pace, practice context, and relevant environmental factors that may impact clinical practice
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Follow-up materials – may include curated readings, sample reports, or assessment tools
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CE-credit eligible – Trainings count toward self-guided Ce in Vermont
What You'll Leave With
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Clear frameworks you can use again and again
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Confidence in reading, interpreting, and applying assessment data
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A sharper sense of clinical precision in your treatment process
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Documented hours that actually improve your practice
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Enhanced assessment competency that supports broader goals of health promotion and client well-being