5 Times to Use Employee Assessments at Your AEC & M Organization

Employee assessments are a powerful tool in any manager’s arsenal. They allow architecture, engineering, construction, and manufacturing organizations to turbo-charge their efficiency and productivity by ensuring each employee is plugged into the right spot on their team and has the skills they need to flourish.

There are several critical times when employee assessments can be leveraged to their best potential. Those scenarios include:

1. Hiring new staff
2. Adding and upgrading technologies
3. Cross-training employees
4. Reskilling and upskilling
5. Career development

Let’s look at these use cases for employee assessments and how the combined power of Pinnacle Series and KnowledgeSmart can help you deliver important, targeted training to your teams.

Hiring new staff

Perhaps one of the most crucial times to use employee assessments is when you’re deciding whether a candidate should even become an employee. If there’s a core skill or piece of software that a particular role requires proficiency in, it can be a gamble just to trust what their resume says.

Making assessments part of the recruiting and hiring process gives you accurate data to help with your final hiring decisions. You can pick the most qualified candidate for the job and understand where additional training might be needed during the onboarding process. Conducting assessments early on in the hiring process gives you a great baseline to work with as you move forward.

Adding and upgrading technologies

As your firm continues to innovate and add new technologies and software to its arsenal, it’s essential to have a plan in place to enable the rapid adoption of new skills. In combination with an e-learning program like Pinnacle Series, employee assessments are a fantastic way to measure how well your team is learning the new tech you’re introducing. You can also use assessments after upgrading to the latest version of a software to make sure there isn’t any knowledge slipping through the gaps.

Cross-training employees

It’s incredibly valuable to have employees who can step into one another’s roles as needed. Cross-training refers to essentially training people for multiple roles so you’re never left without a key player due to illness, vacation, or turnover. Employee assessments can help you match up people who already have similar skill sets and just need a little extra training before they’re able to cover for each other effectively.

Reskilling and upskilling

Skills can grow dull if they aren’t sharpened over time. Employee assessments help you identify when team members need a refresher on a certain skill, even if they’ve learned it before. The world is fast-changing. Employees are often required to learn new skills to keep up with technological and industry changes. Employing a robust skills assessment toolenables organizations to support employees as they encounter the need to develop new skills by identifying gaps in a timely fashion.

With Pinnacle Series, users’ test results can generate a custom learning plan specifically for them. They’ll “test out” of content where they’ve demonstrated mastery, allowing learning content to target skills that could use some brushing up.

Personalized learning does not only help with productive up-skilling but also improves engagement in learning as the content is aligned and relevant.

Career development

If a manager is eyeing a certain employee for a possible promotion or team change, employee assessments can indicate their readiness. They may need to learn some new skills before they’re qualified for a more senior position. When you identify growth opportunities early on, it lets employees and managers work together to pursue training for key competencies so their careers can smoothly progress to the next level.

Skills assessment tests, when used effectively, can assist employers in better differentiating between similar profiles within their workforce. Not only does this allow certain employees to shine, but companies are better able to place employees in the roles for which they are best suited.

Why now more than ever before?

The findings from a survey from McKinsey & Company suggest that companies lack the talent they will need in the future: 44% of respondents say their organizations will face skill gaps within the next five years, and another 43% report existing skill gaps. In other words, 87% say they either are experiencing gaps now or expect them within a few years.

Learn more about the integration between KnowledgeSmart and Pinnacle Series and how it can help target skill gaps at your organization!

We’d also love to let you see it for yourself — Schedule a demo or pilot with our team today, or log in now if you’re a current subscriber.