Peter Saville, Executive Chairman

Selected Publications

Professor Peter Saville is International Chairman of Saville Consulting, an international group of work psychologists, human resource, business and IT consultants, specialising in the professional assessment and development of people at work. He is acknowledged as a world-wide authority in the field of Industrial psychology and has been referred to as an "assessment guru".

Previously Peter was Founder, Managing Director and Chairman of SHL, which was founded in 1977, and Executive Chairman of SHL Group plc which was started on £100 and he took to a value of £250 million on the London Stock Exchange. SHL was one of the largest international consultancy groups specialising in the development and assessment of people at work, having subsidiaries in the UK and 40 countries including the USA, Australia, Japan and all of the major European economies. Peter severed all links with SHL in 2004 following a major disagreement over board policy, particularly new product development and the use of tests delivered unsupervised on the Internet, which he believed would lead to candidate cheating.

Peter is co-ordinating the international activities of the Saville Consulting, excluding the United Kingdom, based in Jersey, the British Channel Islands. He is heavily involved in new product development, training, consultancy and in establishing operations in Europe, the United States, Asia Pacific, Australia and the Caribbean.

Peter Saville graduated with Honours in Psychology and subsequently completed his Masters and Doctorate degrees by research into ability and personality structure. His PhD was examined by Professor Hans Eysenck. Some time later they were head-to-head in a public but good-natured seminar on the role of intelligence and personality testing in the world of work. In 1970 he joined the Test Division of the National Foundation for Educational Research as an assistant psychologist. When he left the NFER in 1977 he was Chief Psychologist at the Test Division, responsible for the standardisation of psychological and educational tests for clinical, educational and industrial use.

Peter Saville has published over 100 academic papers, psychometric tests and books; from articles on test validation, occupational selection, ability and aptitude testing to personality research. In 1971 he produced the British versions of the Wechsler Intelligence Scales and in the same year conducted the much acclaimed adult general population standardisation of Cattell's 16 Personality Factor Questionnaire [16PF] for which Professor R B Cattell gave "lavish praise". He co-authored the Personnel, Critical Reasoning, Technical and Advanced Test Batteries and developed the award-winning Occupational Testing and Personality Measurement courses for HTS Management Consultants and SHL. Perhaps he is best known, however, for creating the original Occupational Personality Questionnaires (once known internally at SHL as Old Pete’s Questionnaire) which have been used with literally millions of people world-wide, for most levels of executive assessment and have been translated into some 20 languages.

Peter's consultancy experience includes many assignments for companies in managerial, engineering, graduate, technical and sales staff selection. He has directed a wide range of projects including the construction of selection tests for the Ministry of Defence, validation studies for Barclays Bank, Prudential Assurance and Xerox, redundancy counselling and assessment assignments for ICI, BMW and Whitbread, interviewing, appraisal and test training for NatWest Bank, Sainsbury, Jaguar and British Petroleum. He has acted as a specialist consultant to the United Nations in staff selection and spoken at numerous conferences worldwide including the British Educational Research Association, the American Psychological Association, the Institute of Personnel and Development, the British Psychological Society and the International Association of Applied Psychology. He has been invited to address management and professional institutes worldwide, from the United States to Japan. Peter succeeded Professor Philip Vernon as International Consultant Psychologist to Mensa and was Psychometric Test Consultant to Hodder and Stoughton Educational.

Peter Saville is a Chartered Psychologist, a Fellow of the British Psychological Society, a Member of the Institute of Directors and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. In 1998 he was listed by Enterprise Magazine as one of the UK's Top Entrepreneurs and in 2001 as one of Britain's Top Ten Psychologists, the only Work Psychologist in the listing. Peter was Visiting Professor of Occupational Psychology at Queen's University from 1991 to 1995, and is currently Visiting Professor at Kingston Business School. He has supervised and examined at Doctorate level.

In the year 2000 Peter Saville was the first Industrial Psychologist to be honoured with the British Psychological Society award for Distinguished Contributions to Professional Psychology. His citation reads “Ultimately the standardisation of questionnaires not specifically designed for an occupational arena made him frustrated and led him to found SHL (now SHL Group plc) in 1977. In doing so he has established Britain as a centre for Psychometric testing and is responsible for cementing the notion of fair and objective assessment in Human Resource departments across the world. As a skilled psychometrician and visionary leader, Peter Saville has made a significant impact on professional psychology in the UK and beyond. The widespread use of SHL tests by many major companies and public bodies is testament to the influence of Peter Saville's remarkable ideas”.

Peter’s academic interests cover business psychology, marketing, intelligence, the structure and assessment of personality, recruitment and selection, human resource and business management, sports psychology, multivariate statistics and diversity. His main area, however, has been psychometrics, standardising, researching and developing tests of general intelligence (IQ), verbal, numerical, mechanical, and spatial abilities as well as those of personality, not only for industry, but also for military, educational and clinical applications.

Peter was born in a working class area of London, England. Being severely dyslexic, due to a short term memory deficit, probably caused by extreme medical treatments during his childhood, he languished in the toughest London secondary modern schools, where violence was the daily norm, until he learnt to rely on visual rather than echoic memory, when he was transferred to an academic grammar school at the late age of 13.

Peter underwent "barbaric" and inappropriate physical treatment as an infant for a pseudo-scoliosis. He has formed the Procrustes Foundation to help others who may have suffered incorrect treatment for scoliosis in their infancy.

Peter's interests include military history and music - American soul, jazz and blues, Otis Redding, Ray Charles to British Rock, The Stones, Pink Floyd, Dire Straits, Clapton, to Puccini. A very competitive sportsman, Peter played soccer into his forties, is a qualified soccer coach and growing up in Shepherds Bush, London, a Queens Park Rangers' supporter. He would typically play squash three or four times a week, enjoyed cricket as a wicket-keeper and rugby as a number eight while at athletics he competed in the long jump, the shot and discus. He now plays squash, tennis and golf. Peter lives in Jersey,The British Channel Islands.

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