Skills are Just the Start
Whether you’re just starting out thinking about a skills strategy, or whether you’ve got your skills taxonomy locked and loaded, one important question pertains: Does your skills strategy have an assessment component?
In a rapidly evolving global context, and given the explosive growth and possibilities that AI has thrust upon the market in the past year, upskilling workforces in the skills that they need for today AND tomorrow is more important than ever. And while much attention is being paid to skills taxonomies, many companies are running behind the curve on actually assessing skills across the workforce.
Companies ahead of the curve turn to skills-based assessments and data collection methodologies that identify gaps, tailor training programs, and ensure that employees are equipped with the necessary competencies to thrive in an ever-changing landscape.
Integrating impactful, skill-based learning and development (L&D) strategies requires training and assessments that accurately reflect the complexity of real-life situations in which your workforce is using these skills.
The real question is: how well are your assessments aligned with a skills-based L&D approach?
Create assessments that reflect real life skill application.
In the realm of training and assessments, there is a growing recognition of the limitations posed by traditional multiple-choice formats. CredSpark invites L&D professionals to explore the imperative of breaking out of the multiple-choice box, advocating for the development of training and assessment experiences that authentically mirror the complexity of applying real-life skills.
Let’s take the example of a call center, where employees must be trained/certified to take calls on various products. In the very old days, those employees might have been evaluated by face-to-face role playing and then the contents of taped practice calls. More recently, employees might be given an online multiple-choice assessment testing their knowledge of products. That multiple-choice assessment is cheaper and faster to administer, but arguably it isn’t able to provide an evaluation experience as comprehensively as a human could.
Imagine you could have the best of both worlds: you could give automatically scored assessments during/after training, but you could also leverage technology to allow human graders anywhere on Earth to review and provide feedback on practice presentations or calls.
Here are a few ideas from the CredSpark team on how to leverage our assessment features to break out of the multiple-choice box and uncover a spectrum of skills, turning your learning experiences into dynamic, immersive journeys that resonate with real-world applications.
- Augment multiple-choice assessments (useful for evaluating lower-level cognitive tasks like remembering and demonstrating understanding) with confidence-based self assessments then look for disconnects in that data
- Invite managers to rate their perception of an employee’s skills and compare that data to the results of assessments listed above
- Offer employees the opportunity to ask to receive additional training; compare those hand-raisers to the people that management believes have the potential to grow.
- Allow employees to submit recordings or presentations and receive feedback from actual humans
- Use this robust data set to gain a deeper understanding of actual skills, which you can then match up against hiring/staffing needs and offer opportunities for advancement
Leverage CredSpark in your skills Assessments
This is how CredSpark supports clients in creating dynamic assessments that reflect real-world application of skills:
- Weight responses to account for partial correctness with custom scoring
- Condition responses and automatically open personalized learning paths for users with our display logic and piping logic features.
- Tag scored questions with specific skills or topics so you can provide more detailed information about participant performance and follow progress over time with category scoring.
- Get a deeper understanding of learner knowledge using confidence ratings, self-assessments that can then be compared with learning outcomes.
- Keep learners engaged and motivated using tools such as live event mode, leaderboards, streaks, participant notifications, multi-part assessments, and badging.
- Assess knowledge, send out temperature checks, and implement scenario-based testing using multiple question types.
- Get macro and micro views of learner data via reporting functions.
Learn more about how CredSpark can enrich your skills-based L&D initiatives! Dig in to our assessment features and book a demo here.
