Skill assessments: How to choose the right type for your team

Skill assessments enable you to understand your team’s current capabilities, identify gaps, and design tech skill development initiatives for your organization’s most critical outcomes.

But assessments aren’t one size fits all. The type that works best for your team will depend on your goals. In this article, we explain which skill assessment to use for your use case and how Skill IQ® Suite makes it easy to understand your workforce’s capabilities.

If you want to get an overview of your team’s skills and design effective upskilling for them, start with wayfinding assessments.

Wayfinding assessments like Skill IQ® Discovery (formerly Skill IQ®) are lightweight, multiple-choice assessments that show you how your team compares to other learners who have taken the same assessment. They then recommend courses or modules based on a learner’s weaknesses to help them close the gap. 

As a leader, wayfinding assessments allow you to:

• Get topical signals of interest to inform your learning strategy

• Understand if your team’s skills are on par with professionals in other organizations

• Deliver learning recommendations from across the platform for your team to explore

Wayfinding assessments are a helpful way to gauge your team’s skills. However, they don’t necessarily validate someone’s capabilities. Use them when you need a quick snapshot of your team’s skills. Don’t rely on them as a measure of real-world performance.

Learn how to roll out skill assessments without stressing out your teams.

Whether it’s the CISSP, AWS Certified Solutions Architect, or something else, earning technical certifications requires a significant amount of time, money, and effort from both you and your learners. 

Practice assessments like Skill IQ® Prep help you make the most of those investments. These certification practice tests are designed to align to industry standards, giving learners realistic practice so they know what to expect going into the exam—and where to focus in the meantime.

As a leader, certification practice tests help you:

• Reduce money spent on failed certification attempts

• Determine if learners have put in the effort to sit the official exam

• Build learner confidence 

• Surface weak areas and learning opportunities

• Provide practice exams that match the domain weighting and difficulty curve of the official exam

• Ensure practice opportunities remain current as certifying bodies revise their exam objectives

But a note of caution: certification preparation assessments tell you if someone has prepared for an official exam. They don’t guarantee that someone will pass. They aren’t proof of skill mastery either. Even when someone earns a certification, they may still need additional training to apply concepts on the job.

According to the Tech Skills Report, organizations rely on continuous learning and training participation (57%), project and delivery outcomes (53%), and formal certifications and qualifications (52%) to evaluate employees’ tech skill proficiency.

These metrics are helpful, but they don’t tell you if someone can actually apply their skills on the job. When it comes to evaluating upskilling success, assigning team members to projects, and ensuring projects cross the finish line, you need a more accurate way to measure employees’ skills.

That’s where objective, standards-based assessments like Skill IQ® Verified come in. These assessments are built on a formal blueprint, using expert-reviewed items and a structured Passed or Not Passed process, to determine if a learner is proficient in a certain skill.

As a leader, objective assessments allow you to:

• Identify your team’s skills gaps

• Validate evidence of employee skills with a trusted approach that combines expert judgment, real learner performance data, and psychometric best practices

• Recommend courses and learning opportunities tied to a learner’s performance and weakest topics

• Access dedicated analytics including each learner's most recent outcome, their best score, and total attempts

When 90% of tech executives say employees need additional instruction after completing training or certifications, objective assessments like Skill IQ® Verified allow you to assess real readiness so training is part of your strategy from the start, not an urgent afterthought.

When it comes to filling skills gaps, more than half of organizations (53%) get stuck trying to find a solution. Skill assessments point you in the right direction, giving you a way to identify gaps, assess capabilities, prepare teams for certs, and provide tailored learning recommendations.

Find the right assessment for your use case. Learn more about Skill IQ® Suite.