According to recent data, U.S. businesses spent upwards of $160 billion on various employee training initiatives in 2020. Shockingly, 58% of organizational leaders reported no management training in that same period. While most businesses invest in employee education and upskilling initiatives, many neglect to provide their leaders with valuable training.
There is no clear reason why most survey respondents received no training. However, a potential issue is that businesses are often at a loss when developing effective leadership skills training programs.
To overcome the challenges of training leaders, organizations must incorporate skills testing into their strategy. Skills tests are critical to developing leadership soft skills and job-specific proficiencies. Join us as we explore why.
The Problem with Traditional Leadership Skills Training
Before we examine the importance of skills tests for leadership skills training, it is important to understand the shortcomings of traditional education. Perhaps the biggest challenge associated with creating a training program involves selecting topics.
How do you know which skills to focus on when creating content? You probably don’t and are simply making an educated guess based on subjective criteria. If you get lucky, you may select the perfect training topics and enhance the skills of your organizational leaders. However, the odds are against you.
What is more likely is that you will choose topics that have limited relevance to your target audience. As a result, many program participants will likely become actively disengaged during training.
Disengaged participants will receive minimal benefits from the program, if any. To make matters worse, none of the time, effort, and resources you invested in the training program will yield measurable return on investment.
How Skills Tests Can Enhance Leadership Training Efforts
While skills tests can be valuable for screening new hires, they are also incredibly useful for internal training and development. There are several ways your organization can use skills tests to enhance leadership training efforts.
First, we recommend using skills tests to identify training needs. You can administer skills tests to organizational leaders to determine which talents they possess and what deficiencies may impact their performance.
After testing, you will likely discover that each leader has a unique combination of strengths and weaknesses. With these results in hand, you can provide each person with specialized training that addresses their areas of need.
You can also use skills tests as a post-training tool to gauge your program’s efficacy. If your training is effective, participants will make measurable improvements. If they make little to no improvement, you will need to refine your program.
Using skills tests to guide your training efforts will substantially increase the effectiveness of your program. Participants will be more engaged because they will receive timely, relevant, and purposeful instruction. Ultimately, they will be able to leverage the skills they gained during leadership skills training to achieve organizational goals and increase the productivity of their subordinates.
Which Leadership Soft Skills Tests Should You Use?
The suite of skills tests you should use will vary depending on your industry. However, leaders in virtually every sector need certain soft skills to succeed.
Most organizations would benefit from administering leadership soft skills tests such as Emotional Intelligence, Communication Skills, Remote Leadership Skills, and Team Management.
Each skills test includes a series of questions in various formats. Common question types include multiple-choice, select-all-that-apply, and true/false.
If none of the pre-built skills tests align with your organization’s needs, you can combine multiple skills tests. You can also create your own customized skills test using eSkill’s testing library questions. Every question was written and subsequently vetted by subject matter experts, which ensures that they are relevant and compliant with EEOC guidelines.
When creating custom skills tests, you can include organization-specific questions. For example, you can create questions regarding your organization’s policies or standard operating procedures. This flexibility will maximize the efficacy of your skills test so you can develop an effective leadership skills training program.
You can administer all skills tests via an easy-to-use testing portal, which means that you do not have to purchase costly testing materials or assign employees to proctor exams. Instead, choose which skills tests you want to administer and provide participants with login information. The results will be available in the administrator dashboard as soon as users log in and complete their assigned skills tests.
Ready to Start Using Skills Tests? Here’s How to Begin
eSkill provides all of the pre-vetted tests you require to help your leadership team build the skills it needs to succeed.
Do you want to partner with the premium skills testing provider in the industry to improve leadership skills training? Contact us to request a demo.