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01 ESkill Turbocharge Your Employee Development With Skills Tests

While finding the right employees is an important part of the success of your company, it is only the first step in establishing a long-lasting, productive relationship with your workforce. Employees brought onboard may have the necessary skills to fill the role for which they were hired, but it is important to build employee development into your organization’s strategic vision. As the saying goes, if you are standing still, you are going backward.

Employee development is not only in your company’s best interests, of course. As recently as 2019, surveys suggested that 94% of employees in the United States would be more likely to remain with their current employer if they had better access to professional development. This means that beyond enhancing your employees’ skills, development will help to increase retention and limit the expenses that come with frequent turnover.

Knowing that professional development is a powerful incentive for both companies and employees is one thing. Implementing effective development programs and policies is another. It can be difficult to match your development opportunities to the needs of your workforce. That is where skills testing can be an extremely useful tool for enhancing the value of your development programs.

How Skills Testing Can Boost Your Employee Development

Despite investing in development programs for their employees, there is often a significant disconnect between the availability of programs and employee engagement. According to “Human Resource Executive,” this underutilization is less about employees having the time available to make use of them and more about a lack of direction. In other words, workers are not sure how to best allocate their time and resources.

With eSkill’s Talent Assessment PlatformTM, you can take full control of employee development, from onboarding new hires to reskilling and upskilling your current workers. Using their extensive library of Skills Tests, you can use a prebuilt module or create your own custom Skills Assessment Tests to determine the skill level of your employees and identify training targets.

When it comes to training employees, however, evaluating learning outcomes is just as important as pinpointing skill deficiencies. While the initial Skills Assessment Test can give you a starting point, post-training Skills Tests provide you with a wealth of information that can help you to improve your development programs as well as determine whether your employees have successfully learned new skills.

It is important to note that skills tests are not a replacement for direct engagement between employees and managers. Employee development should incorporate a range of activities, including on-the-job opportunities and informal mentoring, according to Margaret Rogers in the “Harvard Business Review.” When this level of engagement is incorporated with effective skills testing, your development programs can be exponentially more productive.

Additional Benefits from Adding Skills Testing to Your Employee Development Programs

Incorporating Skills Tests into your employee development programs will make them more effective. However, there are other advantages to skills testing beyond strengthening your development programs. First and foremost, better employee development opportunities translate to lower turnover. Lowering the amount of money you have to spend hiring new employees directly impacts your bottom line, making skills testing a sound investment.

More targeted development can also help make your workforce more adaptable, and thus better able to withstand fluctuations that affect your business. As we have seen this past year in the wake of COVID-19, dramatic changes can occur very quickly, and the companies best suited to handle them are those with flexible workforces because they can quickly shift direction and methodologies.

When your employees have a wide variety of skills pertinent to the operation of your business, you will have more flexibility when it comes to adapting to challenges. Skilled employees can shift between responsibilities, either taking on new roles or adding duties to their existing roles. This gives you a great deal of leeway when it comes to staffing, allowing you to contract and expand your workforce more easily in response to economic conditions.

Another benefit to skills assessment testing is the ability to identify knowledge gaps. Beyond giving you targets for employee development, you may also discover that there are areas in your business in which you simply do not have employees with the skills necessary to perform certain tasks effectively. In addition to employee development, you might choose to add new hires as a means of immediately infusing necessary skills into your workforce.

Finally, skills testing can provide you with insight into employees who are prime candidates for promotion. With eSkill’s Assessment Tools, you can identify employees who have the skills and expertise to move into new positions, along with those who might be ideal candidates for further training to round out their skill set for a future position.

Interested in Using Skills Tests to Turbocharge Your Employee Development Programs?

Learn how you can leverage eSkill’s Talent Assessment PlatformTM to improve employee development results. Request a demo today. 

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