Online Assessments are often thought of as individual checkpoints. We´re all familiar with the typical quiz after having completed a lesson, course, training, or piece of content. And these types of “weigh stations” on a learning journey are important, but they don’t always reflect the bigger picture: How are employees developing skills over time? How is that skill development impacting the achievement of larger organizational goals?

And that is where the opportunity lies: measuring competency development and capturing skills data in a way that reflects the larger purpose, for both businesses and learners.

When you zoom out on the skills journey to consider multiple points of interactions with learners—self-assessment, self-discovery / awareness, different learning interaction points like live training, emails, messages, courses, content, peer- and manager-reviews, confidence levels, simulated tasks, and more—you are able to paint an accurate picture of how well your skills strategy is providing the scaffolding for your company’s and your workforce’s growth.

Imagine the impact any one of these scenarios would have on your learners and business:

• A field rep’s scores on product knowledge assessments are mapped to their sales volume to help identify knowledge gaps that may be affecting their performance.
• You capture skill-related data from multiple assessment points and transfer it to individualized skills dashboards for learners, as well as automatically feeding that data into job-readiness databases that indicate an employee’s preparedness to get started in a new role or specialized work.
• You manage a call center, where employees must be trained/certified to take calls on various products. You give automatically scored assessments during/after training, but also leverage technology to allow human graders anywhere on Earth to review and provide feedback on practice presentations or calls.

These opportunities really just scratch the surface when you start thinking of skills assessment and talent development as a progressive experience instead of a series of discreet interventions.