http://www.nwfusion.com/careers/0419man.html
Taking inventory
Skills assessment can help you hire the
right people the first time and make the
best use of your staff.
By LISA MORGAN
Network World, 04/19/99
ICG Communications needs to hire five WAN administrators, but
Kael Loftus would be happy to find just one. The network
operations center (NOC) team recently hired an administrator who
had an impressive resumˇ and did well in a technical interview, but
who failed on the job.
Loftus and his fellow NOC managers at ICG's San Jose division
realize the results of the interviews they conduct may not necessarily
be indicative of performance, so they are developing a standardized
written test to administer to job candidates.
The test is all about skills assessment, a burgeoning category of tools
and practices. Assessing employees' skills will help companies:
Hire the right people the first time.
Compare their employees' skills.
Spend IT training dollars more wisely.
Deploy skills-based project teams.
In its most basic form, skills assessment reflects traditional human
resources and management practices, such as reviewing resumˇs,
conducting interviews and monitoring employee performance.
Today, though, companies are developing their own methods - or
buying third-party tools - to more accurately gauge the skill sets of
job applicants, consultants, employees and teams.
Talking technology
ICG (formerly Netcom) knows that resumˇs and employment
interviews don't tell the whole story about an individual's skills, so
the company also relies on technical interviews to assess aptitude and
knowledge.
ICG managers spend 1 to 2 hours asking candidates about
everything from the basics of the Open Systems Interconnection
model to the functional differences between the Border Gateway
Protocol and the Open Shortest Path First protocol. The length and
depth of an interview are scaled according to the candidate's
background. The forthcoming written tests will be used as another
skills assessment tool.
Other companies are embracing even more formalized skills
assessment programs for recruiting, training and the creation of
project teams.
For example, Don Harris, staff development manager at Belks
Department Stores in Charlotte, N.C., says his firm decided several
years ago to capitalize on its employees' skills. The retailer tried to
create an inventory of workers' skills, but there was no quick way to
navigate through the paper-based system whenever a specific need
arose. "We ended up with too many useless forms," Harris says.
Harris then turned to SkillView, a suite of client-server and
Internet-based skills assessment tools that lets employees profile
themselves. SkillView allows the company to identify skills gaps,
training needs and proficiency levels of job applicants and
employees. As a result, Belks is getting more out of its training
budget and is now in a position to implement skill-based staffing.
GE Capital Consulting is another company that recognizes the value
of skills assessment.
"In the past, we found that some individuals interviewed well but
were no good on the job. Over time, we realized we needed an
unbiased, standardized method," says Wanda Brooks, recruiting
director at the St. Paul, Minn., consultancy.
The IT consulting firm still conducts interviews and reviews
resumˇs, but hiring managers also use self-assessment forms and
TeckChek, a skills assessment tool designed to pinpoint strengths
and weaknesses in more than 100 IT areas, including NetWare,
Windows NT and Lotus Notes administration.
TeckChek evaluations are administered in a monitored environment,
which usually consists of one or more computers, one or more test
takers and an administrator. TeckChek proficiency profiles include
seven raw scores, percentiles that compare the test taker to others
and a detailed list of strengths and weaknesses. GE Capital
Consulting uses the data to select the most qualified workers for
client projects and to build skill-based teams.
"Vendor certification isn't enough," Brooks says. "Someone once
applied who had been through five popular certification programs.
This person looked great on paper but scored 1% on the TeckChek
evaluation."
While vendor certification enhances an employee's qualifications, it
doesn't provide an accurate measure of skills because each worker's
knowledge base and experience is different.
Skills assessment may become an integral part of human resources
practices, training and IT project management as a means of
streamlining resources. In the meantime, ICG's Loftus says: "We
haven't found a replacement for the good old-fashioned test drive."