E-Learning For Business
To ensure that your e-Learning system is successful it is important you undertake a thorough skills assessment. Here are a few of the reasons.
If you will be required to show a Return on Investment to your senior management then you need to be able to prove that the overall employees skills have improved. By having a skills assessment before the program has started and regularly performing further assessments over time you will be able to provide the required proof of improvement.
Part of the skills assessment will include Training Needs Analysis which will identify gaps in knowledge and skills of your employees. This will result in a report showing what your staff will need to learn in order to be fully competent in the jobs they undertake now and in the future.
The skills assessment identifies any gaps in your corporate knowledge and ensures there are sufficient skills to meet the business objectives, short and long term.
Let us discuss a few ways to perform the assessment. The first decision you will have to make is dependent on your company size, the number of employees you want to assess and the resources available to you. If you are the only person on the project with a limited budget and thousands of employees in many different locations then your approach will be very different from someone who has a dozen staff members all in a single office. What will be the same for everyone is the process, this is that you will have to collect and analyse a lot of data.
It is very important that the information you collect will be kept confidential and your staff must be confident of this or they will not give you honest answers. Although your conclusions and recommendations will be distributed, the individual responses must be kept secure.
If you do not have the time or resources then the function of skills assessment can be contracted out to an external company, here consultants will work with you and if required perform all the tasks on your behalf. This can be quite expensive but will give you the benefit of their expertise. Alternatively you can use specially designed software, there are a number of packages around that you can use. These range in price and applicability, the skill here is to find the right package. However it is possible to collect the data yourself; this is usually done by completing forms that have been designed to capture the relevant information about your employees. Depending upon the size of your organisation you can do this by directly interviewing the employees yourself, send them forms to complete or by training the managers of each department to perform these interviews as part of their regular review.
