Vena Solutions Assessment Practice
The honest version: the documented Thomas use here is development of existing leaders, not screening of applicants. That distinction should change what you spend your week on
Why this page starts with a caveat
Vena Solutions is a Canadian software company building financial planning and analysis tools. Thomas International publishes a case study naming it as a user of the Behaviour assessment and the Emotional Intelligence assessment, and the case is about leadership development.
We could have written this page as though that means you will sit a Thomas test when you apply. Plenty of pages about employer assessments are written exactly that way. It would be wrong, and it would send you off practising for a stage nobody has shown exists in your process. The evidence supports “Vena Solutions uses Thomas instruments”. It does not support “Vena Solutions screens candidates with Thomas instruments”.
Selection and development are genuinely different uses
What the two instruments are
The Behaviour assessment, or PPA
Twenty-four screens of four adjectives. Choose the word most like you and the word least like you in each set. Untimed, under eight minutes, works on any device, and it produces three DISC graphs rather than a score: your work mask, your behaviour under pressure, and the difference between them.
The Emotional Intelligence assessment, or TEIQue
A much longer instrument: 153 items rated on a seven-point scale from completely disagree to completely agree. Thomas gives twenty to thirty minutes for it and does not time it. It was authored by Professor K. V. Petrides at UCL and Thomas describes it as trait emotional intelligence, meaning self-perceived emotional functioning rather than a performance test of emotion recognition.
The important operational detail is that Thomas says TEIQue should only be administered by an accredited expert who can interpret the results, and it lives in the accredited tier of Thomas's platform rather than the general one. That is exactly why it turns up in leadership development and rarely in a hiring funnel.
Trait emotional intelligence is not an emotion test
People conflate two very different things when they hear emotional intelligence assessment. One is a performance test where you look at faces or scenarios and there are correct answers, of the kind several game-based assessment vendors sell. The other is a self-report trait inventory, which is what TEIQue is.
TEIQue asks you to agree or disagree with statements about yourself. A representative item from Thomas's own worked example of its item-writing process is “I regularly think about my thoughts and feelings”. There is no correct response, and there is no photograph of a face anywhere in it. Preparing by practising emotion recognition would be preparing for a different instrument entirely.
How to answer a long self-report questionnaire well
- Use the whole scale. 153 items answered as fives and sixes produce a flat profile that says nothing useful about you. The scale runs one to seven for a reason.
- Answer at your typical, not your best. Think about how you usually are rather than how you were on your best day.
- Do not slow down for consistency. Long inventories deliberately ask similar things more than once. Trying to remember what you said forty items ago produces worse consistency, not better.
- Do it in one sitting. It is untimed, but a questionnaire answered across three days in three moods is measuring the moods.
What a Vena application is actually likely to involve
Vena is a software company, so the realistic pipeline is a recruiter screen, role-specific interviews, and for technical roles a practical exercise. For commercial roles expect a discussion of your numbers and a scenario or presentation. None of that is documented as involving a Thomas instrument, and preparing for the interview loop is where your time actually pays.
Frequently Asked Questions
Will Vena Solutions send me a Thomas test?
Nothing published says so. The evidenced use is leadership development. If you receive an invitation naming Thomas, the PPA is the likelier of the two because TEIQue requires an accredited administrator.
Can you fail TEIQue?
No. Thomas states there are no right or wrong answers and that you cannot pass or fail its questionnaires. In a development context there is not even a comparison pool.
How long does TEIQue take?
Thomas's own pages disagree slightly: its TEIQue product page says complete online in thirty minutes, and its emotional intelligence hub page says typically around twenty to thirty. Allow half an hour and do not rush it.
Is TEIQue the same as Thomas's newer EI measure?
No. Thomas launched a shorter emotional intelligence measure around 2025 that sits in its general platform alongside TEIQue in the accredited one. Thomas has not published the item count, dimension list or response format for the newer measure, so we do not simulate it and nobody should claim to.
Practise the format
Our Thomas practice hub covers the PPA, the HPTI personality inventory and TEIQue, so a long self-report inventory is not an unfamiliar shape when one arrives. If your Vena process includes recorded interview questions, the video interview practice is the more relevant preparation.