The road from beginner to sports champion is a long and unpredictable one. Therefore, choosing a sport that fits their individual characteristics is essential for children to keep them involved in sports. The Flemish Sports Compass is a generic test battery designed to advise children in their sports choice. The test battery includes anthropometric, physical and motor performance measurements and it has the special quality that, in addition to talent detection and talent orientation, it also enhances various derivative test batteries for talent identification. The Flemish Sports Compass consists of field tests appliable in both elementary schools children and in Flemish elite sport schools. On the one hand it is possible to discriminate between different performance levels and on the other this test battery has te ability to detect sport-specific characteristics of an individual. First part of this doctoral dissertation consists of two introductory chapters. The first chapter provides an overview of definitions, theoretical talent models and practical talent systems. The second chapter explains the rationale and the design of the Flemish Sports Compass and displays the preliminary studies for designing the Flemish Sports Compass. In the second part of this dissertation, six original studies are reported. The first study highlights the potential of the Flemish Sports Compass for primary school children. In this study the differences between the sport specific profiles are less pronounced than in the second and the third study, which measured respectively the students of the Flemish elite sport schools and promising athletes of different sports federations. The first three studies indicated that the generic test battery can be deployed on beginners (talent detection) as well as elite athletes (talent identification). The fourth study, with increased specificity, indicates that the generic tests of the Flemish Sports Compass also are able to distinguish between medallists in international competitions and subelite ...