Competences Assessment and Evaluation Differences and Errors – a Case of IT Profession

The purpose of this paper is to verify the hypothesis assuming that appraisal evaluation in companies is overestimated, especially in the case of male IT professionals. Although a valid and reliable evaluation and assessment method exists, and the Development Center method could be mentioned in this context, competences are not assessed properly enough in business. To achieve this goal, the authors analyzed a competence profile relevant to labour market regarding interns graduated from the Polish-Japanese Institute of Information Technology (P-JIIT). The authors explored the results of competence assessment conducted with the Development Center method, as well as the results of performance evaluation upon the completion of a three-month internship in the leading IT companies. The analysis of differences with respect to gender was made basing on the two sources of information on competences. It is preceded by an introduction outlining the main competence-related issues, the Development Center and the performance evaluation principles and errors, as well as the project for IT graduates carried out in the P-JIIT. The findings of the study show that in terms of the performance women in IT industry are evaluated by employers lower than men. This, however, is not the case when we take into consideration reliable scores of assessment conducted by objective assessors during the processes of Development Center.