People Strategy

The Highlands Ability Battery

You already have a natural set of skills that shapes how you work. The Highlands Ability Battery measures them — not what you have studied, not how you feel on the day, but what you actually do quickly and easily.

Osai Consulting is certified to administer the assessment and to walk you through your results.

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What it is

The Highlands Ability Battery — the HAB — is an aptitude assessment. Rather than asking you to describe yourself, it puts you through a series of short timed exercises and measures how you perform. Abilities are assessed by doing, which is what separates the HAB from tests of personality, interests, values or skills.

That matters because aptitudes are stable. They settle in the mid-teens and are not meaningfully changed by training or practice, so the picture the HAB gives you holds up over a career rather than describing the mood of one afternoon.

What it measures

Nineteen worksamples, taken online in roughly three hours. Eighteen of them measure a natural ability; the nineteenth measures vocabulary, which is a learned skill and is reported separately. The abilities fall into three groups:

Personal Style

How you are wired to work — introvert or extrovert, generalist or specialist, and the natural time frame you plan in.

Driving Abilities

Five abilities that shape how you approach problems, including Problem Solving, Idea Productivity and Spatial Relations.

Specialized Abilities

Nine abilities covering how you take in and handle information — Learning Channels, Observation, Visual Dexterity, Music Abilities and more.

How it works

  1. Take the worksamples

    You do the nineteen exercises online, at your own desk. Instructions appear on screen and in audio; each exercise asks you to do or recognize something. About three hours in total, and you can break it up.

  2. Get your reports

    You receive a standard HAB report plus a Career Exploration Supplement — a set of careers to look into, drawn from your own pattern of abilities. Each one links through to the U.S. Department of Labor's O*NET database for current occupational data.

  3. Sit down with a consultant

    A roughly 90-minute debrief is where the results become useful. We go through each ability, what it looks like in practice at work and outside it, and which roles, environments and next steps fit the way you are built.

Who it's for

  • Entrepreneurs deciding what to own and what to hand off
  • People weighing a career change and wanting more than a hunch
  • Students and early-career professionals choosing a direction
  • Teams working out who is best placed to do what

The insight is practical: where to spend your energy, and what to outsource to software or to other people.

The Highlands Ability Battery is a product of The Highlands Company, whose own overview of the assessment is the source for the details on this page.

Ready to find out?

Tell us where you are and we'll get you set up with the assessment and a debrief.

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