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It is so important for managers to understand the abilities of their employees. When you know your employees’ strengths and weaknesses in relation to their job responsibilities, you can better manage them. It allows you to identify potential growth opportunities to train them for. Conducting an employee skills assessment is the best way to do this. But, many managers do not know how to conduct a skills assessment. Find out the skills assessment best practices you need to know before you get started below.
Identify The Important Skills
Identify the most important skills required for satisfactory performance in each and every job position you plan to assess. This list should be comprised of technical skills and soft skills, like organization, time management or self motivation. Be sure to also indicate how well an employee must perform each of these skills in order to be successful in their position. This will prepare you to create an employee skills assessment that helps employees better themselves in their roles.
Keep Things Unbiased
All employee assessments must be neutral, unbiased and fair. These skills assessments cannot take into account race, religion, sexual orientation, gender or any other personally identifying traits. Any employee assessment that is biased can lead to discriminatory employment decisions being made. That is not only problematic, but also illegal. Even if you do not create a skills assessment of your own, be sure to check for its fairness and neutrality. Otherwise, you could wind up in a heap of trouble.
Know Which Assessment To Use
Certain assessments are better suited to test certain skills. Be sure to choose the best assessment to identify ability levels of each employee skill you are interested in assessing. Some skills are best assessed using written tests. Other skills are best tested through observation or simulation. Obviously, team building skills cannot be tested using a multiple choice test. Be sure to identify the best assessment for each skill you plan to test in order to create an effective skills assessment.
Offer Assessment Resources
For your employees’ sake, offer resources to help them prepare before conducting the assessment. This is not just a nice thing to do. It is absolutely necessary in order to achieve a fair and unbiased test. Allow employees access to resources that help them prepare to do well on the exam or observation. Let them know what skills you will be assessing and how well they are expected to perform in order to achieve a satisfactory rating. This way, your employees have the opportunity to prepare to do their absolute best on this test.
Provide Feedback
After the employee assessments are complete, be sure to provide feedback. Skill assessments are worthless if you do not give workers a chance to improve based on test findings. These assessments should not just be used to provide reasoning for termination. That will do serious damage to employee morale. Instead, use the skills assessment as a tool to help employees identify their weaknesses. Then, provide feedback on how they can improve these areas. You may even choose to offer business acumen training and other programs, if needed. That way, you can improve employee job satisfaction and employee outcomes all at once.
If you are a manager, particularly a talent manager, you know how difficult it can be to identify employees’ strengths and weaknesses. Thankfully, skills assessments make it much easier. But, in order to create an employee skills assessment that is successful, you need to follow the five best practices detailed above. These skills assessment best practices will help you better manage employees for lower employee turnover and increased employee success.
Photo from https://talexes.com/blog/3-strategies-effective-employee-assessment-implementation/
