Short answer: No, and it isn't a gap. Industry accounts for very little of the variation in AQ scores. The comparison that matters is already built into every report, and the analysis that will tell you most about your people is the one inside your own organisation.
Why industry benchmarks could produce a false signal
It's a natural request, and clients often ask for one as a way of understanding whether their results are "normal".
When we look at what actually drives variation in AQ scores across our assessment base, industry barely registers. It accounts for roughly 1% of the variation in overall AQ. Job level does somewhat better at around 5% of the variance. The single strongest structural predictor is the organisation a person works for, which accounts for closer to 13% of the variance.
Two organisations in the same sector, employing people at the same levels doing similar work, can produce markedly different AQ profiles. Two organisations in entirely unrelated industries can look strikingly similar. The sector is not what's driving the difference.
This is consistent with how the A.C.E. model is built. Ability and Character travel with the individual. Environment is a read on immediate working conditions: how supported someone feels, what stress they are carrying, how their team functions, whether the wider company backs change. Those conditions are set locally, by leadership behaviour and team culture, not by the sector on the letterhead.
An industry benchmark would therefore give you a number that doesn't move with anything you can influence.
"But surely some sectors are different?"
It's the obvious objection, and we've tested it.
Across our assessment base, the gap between the highest and lowest scoring industries on AQ Ability is smaller than half a standard deviation. The spread of scores inside any single industry is more than twice that gap.
Take the public sector, where the intuition is usually strongest. Its average Ability score sits within a few points of the overall average, and around a third of the individuals in it score above the mean of the highest-scoring sector in our data. More tellingly, when we compare public sector organisations to each other, the difference between the highest and lowest scoring organisations is close to four times the difference between the highest and lowest scoring industries.
Sectors differ a little. Organisations within them differ a great deal. That is the whole finding, and it is why we point clients at their own data.
The comparison is built into the AQ report
AQ bands are norm-referenced. When an AQ Ability or AQ Environment sub-dimension reads Low, Medium or High, that band has been set against a global reference population drawn from AQ assessments spanning every sector, region and role level.
So a result is never being read in isolation. The comparison has already been made before the report reaches you.
These thresholds have been fixed since April 2022 and have not changed since. That means scores stay directly comparable over time, so a reassessment can be read against an earlier one without adjustment.
What to look at instead
The signal you're looking for is almost always internal. Four questions are usually more productive than any external comparison.
Where is the spread? A group average conceals more than it reveals. Two teams with the same mean Mental Flexibility score can be in completely different situations — one clustered tightly, one split between people who thrive on ambiguity and people who find it costly. The distribution is the finding, not the average.
Who sits at the edges, and why? Outliers in either direction are worth understanding rather than smoothing away. A markedly low Company Support score in an otherwise positive group is information about a particular manager, team or location. A markedly high one may point to a practice worth spreading.
How do the Environment sub-dimensions vary? Ability and Character tend to be relatively stable across a group. Environment is where organisational reality shows up. Variation in Company Support, Team Support, Work Environment and Work Stress across people who work in the same place is a direct read on how consistently the organisation is experienced.
What does this say about change readiness specifically? If you're assessing ahead of a transformation, restructure or technology rollout, the Change Readiness and Reskill indices, together with Unlearn, will tell you more about how the change is likely to land than any sector comparison could.
One important caveat
This applies where the group being assessed genuinely shares a workplace: an intact team, department or organisation.
If your cohort is assembled from people who work in different organisations, such as an open programme or a cross-company leadership group, Environment scores must not be read as a collective signal. Each score describes one individual's separate working conditions, and averaging them produces a number that describes no real environment. In that situation, Ability and Character patterns are still meaningful across the group, but Environment should stay at the individual level.
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