The job market that we see today is entirely different from what it has been just two decades ago. Earlier, having a few skills was enough to get a job for an entire lifetime. However, the skills that are required today are never enough and professionals need to upskill or reskill themselves every few years in order to be relevant for the job market.
Technology also plays a vital role in this changing job market. The increasing use of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and augmented reality in every industry requires everyone to stay updated with the latest innovations. Furthermore, the rate at which these technologies are evolving makes it all the more important for every business to keep track of the skills of their employees.
What is an Employee Skills Assessment?
Employee skill assessment is a method used by organizations to assess the skills, knowledge, and core competencies of their employees. These tests help determine employees’ abilities to match the requirements of the business to achieve its goals.
Such skill assessments are very beneficial for identifying skill gaps and moving employees from one position to another within the company. They also help managers identify which employees are potential future leaders and which ones need to reskill themselves to stay relevant for the job positions in the company.
To conduct an employee skills assessment, you must consider evaluating everyone on different criteria and skills, such as hard skills and soft skills. The actual assessments can take place either online or in offline modes.
You can design the skill assessment tests based on the different divisions in the company. Alternatively, you can also create tests for single skills packaged together for different employees, based on their job roles.
Benefits of Assessing Your Employees’ Skills
Evaluating your employees' skills helps you in a lot of ways, not just by making you understand every individual’s skills and competencies. Here are a few benefits that your business can reap from employees’ skill assessments.
Know Your Workforce Inside Out
While conducting employees’ skill assessments, the employees are made to undergo several written, practical, and conversational tests, allowing the employer to know the skills, competencies, and knowledge of every employee in the organization.
Using this data, employers or strategists can make informed decisions about recruitment as well as talent management of the organization. Deciding on the workload distribution among employees and teams also becomes easy with skill assessments. Moreover, knowing the capabilities of your current workforce is crucial to planning short-term and long-term goals.
Close Skill Gaps by Investing in Learning and Development of Your Workforce
Perhaps, one of the most important advantages of conducting employees’ skill assessments is being able to close the skill gaps. Through these skill assessments, you will be able to analyse the disparity between the skills and competencies that the employees currently have versus the skills and competencies that are needed by the company to meet its objectives.
By knowing the difference, you can easily point out which employees need to be upskilled or reskilled and on which skills. Thus, you can invest in the learning and development of your workforce by training the target employees on the critical skills identified during the assessments.
These tests also make it clear if the workforce of a company needs training on the latest tool or technology, such as AI or ChatGPT, to become more efficient and productive in their work.
Set Benchmarks for Recruitment
Skill assessments of employees help recruiters a lot in deciding their recruitment strategy. Using the data derived from these tests, recruiters can set skill and competency benchmarks for their future recruitments.
Through the use of these results, they can make an informed decision about what kind of employees with what kind of skills are crucial for the organization and which ones aren’t required by the business anymore.
👉 Read More: How UST Uses WeCP to Transform Candidates into Skill-Mapped, Project-Ready Talent
Increased Employee Engagement and Retention
Employees stay with a company for their professional development and growth. And, when a company invests in the professional growth of their employees through skill and competency assessments and training, the employees are bound to get more engaged with the business, leading to increased chances of staying with the company for a long time.
How to Assess Employees’ Skills and Competencies?
There are several ways to conduct a 360-degree skill assessment of an employee. Below is a list of skill assessment methods that can help you in the process.
Skill Tests
Before you can start conducting the skill tests, you need to find out the skills that need to be evaluated in your workforce. To identify these relevant skills for your company, you will have to consider the job requirements and responsibilities that the employees of your company fulfil daily. These could be technical skills, soft skills, communication skills, behavioral skills, etc.
Some of the tests that can help you assess these skills are -
- Coding tests
- Psychometric tests
- Language tests
- Personality tests
- Numerical tests
Several skill-testing tools, such as WeCP, can help you in conducting these tests during hiring & upskilling for your workforce.
👉 Read More: How WeCP helped Infosys Evaluate 100k+ Super Coders
If you want to generate assessment questions that are relevant to your industry, you can check out WeCP AI Copilot. This not only generates questions but also helps with the evaluation and report generation of each employee working at the company.
Peer Reviews
A team consists of a group of people who work together and know each other inside out. Thanks to working together for a long time, peers know the strengths as well as weaknesses of their teammates, making this type of skill assessment a very reliable method.
When employees are encouraged to provide constructive feedback about their teammates, it can result in getting a clear picture of the skills and competencies of each employee. Such reviews also help the team leaders get an insight into the team dynamics and any specific skills on which the team needs to be trained.
Self-Assessments
Although self-assessments aren’t very reliable, they can help you identify every individual’s hidden abilities and skills. From a simple exercise of knowing their hobbies, you can assess which employees can do good in leadership roles or creative roles - today or after a few years.
However, self-assessments by employees themselves can also be misleading. That’s because some people have the nature to exaggerate their skills and abilities while others tend to underestimate themselves. Nevertheless, the results of self-assessments combined with the results of peer reviews can help define the confidence that an employee has in his abilities.
Performance Review
A regular and frequent one-to-one performance review is an excellent method of understanding an employee’s skills. A one-to-one review that occurs between a manager and an employee helps in identifying targets, work progress, line of action, and challenges that the employee faces in accomplishing the targets. These reviews also help managers assess their employees on their skills and work efficiency.
Behavioral Interviews
In behavioral interviews, the interviewer asks the employees about a certain problem or situation and how they overcame it or how they would overcome the challenges. Then, the consistency of what they state versus how they have behaved in the organization or with their teammates in the past is analysed, revealing their emotional intelligence and behavioral skills clearly.
Customer Feedback
Taking customer feedback is an excellent way of evaluating your frontline employees’ skills and abilities. Your customers’ feedback is an invaluable tool to assess your employees' efficiency and productivity towards achieving your goals.
Your customers are the best people to point out the most promising things about your company as well as your shortcomings, thereby providing you with suggestions for improvements in several aspects, including the skills and competency levels of your employees.
Best Practices for Conducting Employee Skills Assessments
Below are some of the best practices that an employer needs to follow while conducting skill assessments of their employees.
- Make sure that your employees are well informed of the purpose of gathering the skill assessment data. It is also important that they are aware of who is going to collect and access this data.
- The skill assessments shouldn’t be very subjective, or else they will lose their essence and effectiveness. In fact, depending on the job roles and responsibilities, the evaluation process should be clear and concise and should also be limited to a few questions.
- Using a variety of evaluation methods helps keep up the interest levels of the employees and also provides different types of insights into employees’ personalities. Therefore, use a combination of different types of skill assessment methods.
- When the process is completed, employees shouldn’t feel that their time, efforts, and the data collected have been wasted. So, ensure that you provide them with relevant training to fill in the skill gaps identified during the assessments.
Conclusion
Assessing the skills and competencies of your employees in different spheres from time to time is utterly important for the growth of the company as well as the employees. Some techniques to evaluate employees’ skills are skill tests, peer reviews, self-assessments, performance reviews, and behavioral interviews.
To conduct hard skill tests, WeCP offers solutions by which you can easily create tests for employees on all types of coding languages and techniques, evaluate their responses, and generate a cumulative report with minimal human intervention. It can also rank the employees so you know who stands where in a particular skill, leaving no room for any complaints.
Want to know more on how WeCP can help you out? Try WeCP for free or Schedule a Call with us.
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