In 1999, futurist and entrepreneur Ray Kurzweil proposed the “Law of Accelerating Returns,” or the argument that technological change doesn’t advance linearly, but exponentially. Every year, the rate of change increases, causing each year’s innovations to wildly outstrip the previous year’s. It’s easy to see that this prediction was an accurate one. The business landscape changes so quickly that once-innovative technologies, business models and working practices are outdated just a few years down the line. In a world dominated by rapid change, how can businesses keep up?
Digital assessment tools and eLearning serve as one way to ensure your employees understand and are prepared for the many changes taking place in the world. As market forces, technology, regulations and business requirements rapidly evolve, providing corporate education that can keep your workforce informed will be crucial. Here are three ways how businesses are using digital assessment tools to keep pace.
Enable Iterative Improvement
When selecting digital assessment tools, it’s critical to pick ones based on open standards. There are a host of benefits to doing so, but chief among them is the ability to adjust and adapt training to better fit your business and market.
When your solution is open source and standards-based, you’ll be able to create tailored content and gain access to performance data. You can measure the performance of employees who have achieved certain credentials, compare their on-the-job performance with their digital assessment and identify gaps and opportunities to improve your accreditation system by tweaking certain lessons, removing others or creating new ones as needed.
Since the modern business environment is ever-changing, you’ll be able to modify your training based on internal innovations or external market forces. If, for example, a new government regulation requires your employees to change a key process, you’ll be able to adjust your training on the fly to account for that change.
Gain Business Outcomes
The market may be constantly changing, but establishing a well-developed eLearning program provides several lasting benefits to your business.
For one, an eLearning program can contribute to your brand identity. Not only does a credentialing program establish your business as trustworthy, competitive and elite, but a well-built eLearning program can serve as a badge of honor in your industry. If your program is sufficiently rigorous, potential employees will seek you out in order to attain your program’s certification.
Furthermore, a better eLearning program means faster, more effective onboarding. Your employees will ramp up and understand their role faster, ensuring that they’re both more productive sooner and feel less isolated or confused at work. Not only are happier, more productive employees intrinsically desirable, but research shows that great onboarding processes boost new hire retention by a full 82 percent.
Integrate and Scale
For an enterprise, it’s crucial to seek out digital assessment tools built on open standards like the IMS Global standards. The reason is twofold: 1) to make it easier to integrate into your existing technology ecosystem and 2) to make it easier to scale your solution or change elements of your tech stack.
You could, for instance, decide that you want to link data from your digital assessment tools to your applicant tracking system (ATS) so HR can get a holistic view of an applicant’s promise. Connecting these two systems without open standards could result in a lengthy project whose costs far outweigh the benefits. Later, if you decide to upgrade your ATS, you would have to go through the same costly process all over again. Using open standards, however, means you won’t have to hire the original vendor for an integration project and that you’ll have more control over the end result.
Which Digital Assessment Tools Are Right for You?
There are a lot of digital assessment technologies out there. If you want to gain the benefits described above, then it’s important to see if a given tool meets your needs. You’ll want to ask questions like:
- Is this solution tailored to my industry?
- Does it support content creation?
- Will I own my intellectual property and will that content be secure?
- Is it based on open standards?
- Is there a responsive customer success team available to support me?
If you’re looking for more information on what features can make or break a digital assessment tools, you may find it useful to read our Practical Guide to Digital Assessment. In it, we lay out a blueprint for selecting a digital assessment platform that not only smoothly integrates into your existing systems, but enables you to do more across your organization.
