Description

To effectively coach frontline workers to move ahead, you have to understand their current skillset and education level. Assessing their skills, college readiness, and career interests are good places to start, and there are many tools out there that measure a range of skills and attributes.  Assessment results are most often used to develop individual education plans with achievable learning milestones that guide an employee towards advancement opportunities, such as training to develop basic skills and work-based learning opportunities.

Process

Assessments are a first step to advance a person’s education or career. Think carefully about who should administer the assessment, who has access to the results, and how the results are reported and used to help a person create a career plan.  Career coaches or case managers often administer assessments or partner organizations such as community-based organizations, workforce investment boards, or community colleges. It is important that both employees and managers understand that assessments are for development purposes only, will not be used for performance evaluation, compensation reviews, or as a condition of continued employment.

Here are some common types of skills and educational assessments*:

• Career interests: Interest assessments usually match personal preferences or characteristics to careers. Popular career interest surveys include O*NET Interest Profiler on My Next Move, Strong Interest Inventory^®, Holland Code Career Test, StrengthsFinder, and Myers-Briggs Type Indicator
• Literacy levels and college readiness: These types of assessments are usually done in conjunction with other professional development plans. Employees are typically assessed both before and after taking a skills course to determine placement and measure progress. Some of the most common adult learning assessments include Tests of Adult Basic Education (TABE), the Adult Basic Learning Examination (ABLE), Comprehensive Adult Student Assessment System (CASAS) BEST (Basic English Skills Test), ACCUPLACER®, and Compass^®.
• Work readiness: These assessments generally measure foundational skills required for workplace success and measure workplace skills that can affect job performance. WorkKeys^® is the best known of these types of assessments.

*These examples should not be taken as an endorsement by the National Fund for Workforce Solutions