Assessing Employee Skills

Assessing employee skills to create a stronger team

Assessing employee skills can help you determine if your employees are in the roles best suited for them, and if any of them are ready to be promoted, or instead should be transferred to another department or position. Your employees will also benefit from an employee skill assessment, because they can use it as a learning tool to discover more about their strengths, weaknesses and goals.

With an employee skills assessment, you can:

1. Ensure your current employees are in the best role for their skills.
2. Identify employees who are ready to move up in the company.
3. Determine which applicants are best suited to the position you're hiring for.
4. Help employees learn more about themselves, by sharing with them their assessing employee skills list of results.
   

 

Hire a consultant to evaluate employee skills

If you want to institute company-wide employee skill evaluation, you may need the expertise and experience of a professional consultant, who has likely overseen similar projects at other companies like yours. They can either test the employees themselves or help you implement a plan for ongoing evaluations.
Try: DCOT Assessments and Coaching, an authorized partner of Profiles International, offers assessments, background checks and business coaching. DecisionWise Consultants offers assessments, coaching and training.

Sign up with an online job skill assessment provider

If you want to perform a worker skills assessment only sporadically, or want to use a wide variety of assessments, an online skill evaluation service may offer you the greatest flexibility and value. With these services, an employee or prospective employees complete the skills profile online, either at the workplace or at home. Rather than investing in a single process or test, you may prefer the option of using whichever test best suits that specific situation--thus creating a more personalized way of assessing employee skills.
Try: Brainbench offers online aptitude, assessment and personality testing in over 600 areas, in addition to custom test development. The Assessment Team also offers online employee assessments and evaluations.

Purchase software to assess employee skill

If you have a large number of employees, or plan to survey employee skills frequently, you may want to invest in skill assessment software. You'll have access to the tests whenever you need them, and because they're installed on your own system, you won't have to worry about problems with your Internet connection or disruptions at an outside provider's site.
Try: Halogen Software offers a free trial of its eAppraisal software, and Valtera offers assessment and selection software that measures skills, aptitudes and knowledge.

 

• An employee skill assessment is a valuable way for you to determine which employees are ready for leadership roles and which need more coaching first. But an assessment has even greater impact if you share the results with your employees, so they can learn more about their aptitudes and interests, and may be more motivated to work on their personal and professional development.

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