Video Transcript
Hello everyone, and welcome to our webinar “How to Use a Knowledge Assessment to Identify Workforce Strengths and Weaknesses.” I’m Lauren with Vector Solutions, and I’ll be serving as your webinar organizer today.
About Vector Solutions
We are Vector Solutions, and we aim to make your organization safer, smarter, and better. If you’re not familiar with us, we make learning management systems, online training courses, and accredited continuing education for many industries. We also offer a risk intelligence and communication platform, as well as EHS and SDS management software.
Meet the Speakers
And now it’s my pleasure to introduce our speakers for today: Jennifer Lawson, Senior Product Manager at Vector Solutions, and Sydney Lauro, Product Marketing Manager at Vector Solutions. Thank you both for joining us today, and I’ll let you take it from here.
Jennifer Lawson
All right, thanks, Lauren. Hi everyone, I’m Jennifer Lawson. I’ve been working with Vector Solutions in our commercial markets for seven years now, and I do live by our mission to make sure our customers are given the tools to stay safer, smarter, and get better in their jobs and careers. And I’m excited to be here with you today to show off one of our newest features that has personally been an exciting launch for me this year, being that it’s something our customers have been asking for and are really going to make an impact in the way that they assess their employees.
With that, I’ll hand it over to Sydney to give her introduction.
Sydney Lauro
Thanks, Jennifer. So I’m Sydney Lauro, product marketing manager at Vector. I’ve spent my whole career working at organizations that support frontline and deskless workers, and it’s one of the reasons I love working at Vector. Like Jennifer says, we’re so mission-oriented and all about supporting the workforce that really makes everything run, right? Manufacturing and construction, you name it, are really important industries, and we’re so proud to support them.
And in many of my roles, I’ve worked very closely with learning and development teams to make sure that we’re getting the right information, training, and resources to the right teams to support them in their roles. So I’m excited to be here with you all today to talk about competency assessments and how we can use them.
Agenda Overview
We have a really exciting agenda lined up for you all today. We’re gonna talk about what competency assessments are and the importance of having a cohesive knowledge assessment strategy. It will cover the main benefits and use cases of this kind of tool. And then Jennifer’s gonna walk you through Vector LMS and the competency assessment tool for you today to show you how you can streamline administering assessments, following up with remedial training, and then tracking your success.
Poll: Assessing Knowledge Gaps
So just to kick things off, we’re gonna launch a quick poll. We wanna get a sense of how you are currently assessing employee knowledge gaps at your organization? And maybe you haven’t really started yet, maybe you’re just kind of getting started, maybe it’s a little more ad hoc, all of that’s okay. We’re just trying to get a sense of where everybody’s at today and the methods that you’re using.
And if there’s something else that you’re doing that we don’t have listed here, we would love to know about it. So, you can drop that in the question section as well. We’d love to hear the many ways that this is being done in organizations.
All right. Really interested to see what the results are here, what everybody’s doing.
All right, so it looks like a bit of a mix. Welcome to those who have not implemented assessments yet. You’re definitely in the right place, but you’re definitely seeing a lot of surveys, quizzes, and performance reviews being the main method. So that’s fantastic.
Types of Competency Assessments
So when we look at how these can be implemented, there are really three main types of competency assessments.
Pre-Hire Assessments
So the first one is a pre-hire assessment. So, it is kind of screening potential candidates for a role. We’ve all probably taken something like this in our careers, but this is a great way to make sure you’re hiring the right people at the right time for your organization. To make sure that people have the skills that they say they have to keep your workforce safe and compliant. You may also lack specific skills. This can help you hire for the right fit as well if you need specific things in the workforce. And, ultimately, this is gonna save you time, be more strategic, and then create a better onboarding plan.
So we know that when we onboard employees, it has a big impact on their whole tenure at your organization, how engaged they are and committed, and how quickly they get up to speed. And this can just be a great way to make sure that you’re providing the training that they need at the right time.
Pre-Training Assessments
The second main category is these pre-training assessments. So anytime before you actually put them through your training program. So great use for this would be that employees might be able to test out and save some time if they already have the competencies and the knowledge, they might not need the training. Say it’s a refresher course that you want them to take; that’s not required. They might be able to get out of that. But then you might also realize that somebody needs a lot more training than you realized. And this can be a way to find those gaps ahead of time and make sure they’re on the right track.
Post-Training Assessments
The third type is your post-training assessment. So this is really the gut check. Did they actually walk away from that training with the knowledge that they need? So it’s validating the effectiveness of your training program, and then it can help you find if there are still additional areas where they need help.
You can also use pre- and post-training assessments if you want somebody to, maybe you wanna put them on the management track. This is a really great way to see if they’re ready and how much training they need. Then, use your post-training assessment to make sure they’re ready to move on to the next step. So, you can use a variety of these tools at different stages, kind of strategically together.
Poll: Use Cases for Competency Assessments
So, with that, we’d love to hear, we’re gonna do one more poll to kind of get a sense of what you would wanna use a competency assessment tool for? Check all that apply here. Are you gonna assess your job candidates? Are you really thinking of finding those skills gaps? Is it more about the onboarding program? Let us know. And again, if there are certain things that you would do that aren’t listed here, let us know in that question section because we’d love to hear them.
Real-World Use Cases
One really interesting use case that a customer of ours just shared with me is they’re actually gonna use this to prove the ROI of their program and actually figuring out how much they’re losing in wages based after they hire a candidate and they assess their skills, if they only have fifty percent of the knowledge that that role requires, they can then compare that to the salary and make an estimate of what those lost wages and those skills gaps are costing them and be able to measure that over time. I just think that’s so important and creative to figure out how they can continue to improve. So, definitely no shortage of ways to put this to use at your organization.
Alright. So, let’s see. So, a little bit of everything. I’m not surprised. Identifying skills gaps is definitely a big need. I think that’s something that we’re seeing across the board from a variety of industries. And I love seeing ongoing professional development here. I think it’s so important to be proactive with that. So really fantastic. But yeah, we’re gonna use it for everything. Awesome.
Overview of the Competency Assessment Tool
So, before I turn it over to Jennifer to actually show you this tool in action, we’re gonna share a quick video that just kind of sets it up and gives you a quick preview of our solution.
In a world where every decision counts, meet Alex, a manager who’s about to transform their team’s future. Alex faces a daunting challenge in bridging their team’s skill gaps to meet evolving industry demands. However, by using the competency assessment tool within the Vector LMS, Alex crafts a custom pre-training assessment for their team to pinpoint known skill gaps before they impact plant productivity. Alex’s team takes the pre-training assessment, where their skills and knowledge gaps are identified in real time, paving the way for a targeted training strategy for each team member.
Vector Solutions’ award-winning e-learning training courses are auto-assigned to team members who didn’t pass the assessment to target each of their unique gaps. Whether it’s courses on safety awareness, technical knowledge, soft skills, or a variety of other topics, team members receive a tailored learning experience, bridging the divide between those needing to enhance their skills and those already proficient. Post-training assessments confirm team competency levels reached, downtime reduced, skill gaps closed, compliance and safety benchmarks are met, and the organization’s operations run more smoothly. Alex’s strategic vision for a more skilled and efficient team is now a reality. With the Vector Solutions competency assessment tool within the Vector LMS, managers like Alex can turn workforce skill gap challenges into organizational victories faster than ever. Transform your team’s future today.
Demo: Building a Competency Assessment in Vector LMS
All right. I’m gonna take it from here and give myself one moment to share my screen. We really love that video because it gives us a great summary of what this tool does and puts it all into perspective based on some of the use cases that Sydney shared earlier in the slides. Even with that little preview, we want to take it a step further and go into a deep dive in our LMS to show you firsthand how to build a competency assessment using our Vector LMS.
So, you see my screen now, I’m going to be looking kind of in this direction as I’m navigating our platform and want to walk through an example with you. In this example, I’m gonna use an HVAC technician as a job role that many of you said you’re looking to use this for, or looking for competency assessments to identify skill gaps. Let’s imagine that we have a job role of HVAC technician in our organization, and we want to assess all of those in that job role to understand where the skill gaps exist, and then know immediately what courses we need to assign from our Vector library to enhance their knowledge in that particular area.
With that in mind, let me jump right in and show you how this would work. From where I’m at right now in our Vector LMS, you can see I’m in the administration tab, and I’m gonna jump into our quiz builder feature. I first want to show you I did a little bit of pre-building to set this example up to save us some time. So, I’m going to build an assessment that is going to cover four different subject areas. So, there’s actually going to be four different assessments within a bundle. The learner is going to have to go through and show me their competency level in each of these areas.
As an HVAC technician, I want to assess their knowledge in refrigeration, HVAC, and electrical, and we’re going to build a safety knowledge quiz together today. You can see I’ve already pre-built these four—or these three, excuse me—and I’m going to build the fourth one here by clicking new. I’m going to go through these steps of selecting my file folder where I want to save this quiz. Here’s where we’re going to build the safety knowledge quiz. I’m thoughtfully using the term “knowledge quiz” in this particular example because where the power in this tool lies is that we can build a quiz to assess the knowledge of our learners. But Vector LMS also has the capability to build task lists where we can build a skills assessment to do an on-the-job review of whether or not they can actually perform the task that their job requires.
So, in a more advanced competency assessment, you could assess their knowledge to understand if they can tell me about it—do they know all the information they need to know for their job? Can they show me that they know how to do it? That’s where the power of the broader competency assessment comes into play with the many tools that our platform offers. We’re gonna stay focused on the knowledge quiz today, but I felt it was important to mention that because it really rounds out the idea of what a competency assessment is.
From our quiz builder, our competency assessment tool includes the capability to bring in questions from our award-winning content that was mentioned in the video you just watched. You’ll find this button called “Vector Questions.” This gives you access to all of the Vector content that is in your library, and you can choose which courses you want to pull the questions from to use in the assessment for your learners.
You can see in this grid here that I have my course names, and I even see this SKU column. That’s the Vector course SKU, which you may be able to search by when given a library list of all the courses—or maybe you want to search by a specific keyword. In this case, I’m creating my safety assessment, and I want to add the slips, trips, and falls course because that’s a very important safety topic that I want to be sure to assess across. I’m also going to look for heat stress here because I want to ensure that my HVAC technicians understand and can tell me—or show me—that they have the knowledge for maintaining an appropriate level to reduce or prevent heat stress. Then, I also want to know if they have knowledge in the area of ladder safety. I’m just picking some examples here.
Once I’ve selected the courses from Vector that I think are the most important for this particular quiz, I’m going to hit the select button, which will take those three courses. And it did not go. So let me hit that again. Now it’s going to load all of the questions from those courses into my quiz. Here, you can see in this column that these are all of the questions about heat stress. This is heat stress, which comes from a Vector course, right? Ladder safety questions are from Vector, and then slips, trips, and falls questions are from the Vector course. So, we can see here that that was created automatically with a few clicks of a button—a forty-one-question quiz that I can now save and push out to my learners to get a good gauge on what their knowledge is in these three areas of topics.
I could take that a step further. I could also add my own organization-specific questions for this particular area. If there’s a specific angle of safety that my organization wants to ensure our employees know or our HVAC technicians know, because of the specific job role that they do for our customers, I can add my own questions here, too. There are three different question types that I could add on top of the Vector questions to really round out the way that this learner is answering the assessment.
Once I have the quiz in the format that I want, I will have all the questions here. Just to highlight really quickly on some other ways I could format this: maybe I don’t want all of these questions. I could delete a few. Maybe I want to mix up the order manually and really be specific about what order I want these questions to be in. I can drag and drop to move those around. Once I have that in the order that I want, the next step is going to go into the properties tab, and this is where I can determine the specific settings for this quiz.
I’m not going to spend too much time on each of these tabs, but I will thumb through them really quickly just to show you some of the options within these quiz properties settings. The most important here, for the purposes of our competency assessment, is going to be this assessment tab. This is where I get to decide whether or not I want to take some automated action as a result of the assessment. This is where a lot of power lies as well. You’ve noticed one powerful button is to pull in questions from our Vector award-winning content, and the other power in this tool is automatically assigning training when the user fails the assessment.
If they cannot demonstrate proficiency, I set the passing score at eighty percent. If they don’t pass this with an eighty percent, I get to decide which courses I want them to automatically be assigned. For ease of use, we add in the three courses that I searched questions from earlier, but maybe I want to add in two other courses, or maybe I don’t want them to take all three of those courses for whatever reason. I do have the flexibility to come in and make some adjustments. I can either remove some courses or search for more courses and add those to that training plan. It’s not limited to Vector courses here. You could also add custom content that your organization has already built. So, know that there is some flexibility in this tool as well.
For the sake of this example, I’m going to leave it as is, and I’m going to go ahead and click okay. I’m going to save this quiz. Oh, I did forget a step there when I was describing this. Assignment identifier—this is actually a really important step because when they are—or if they are—assigned these three courses, this assignment identifier lets you know that it was specifically from this particular assessment. I like to keep the identifier clearly named so I can look back when I’m looking through my reporting and tracking to know that that’s where their assignments came from. So now I can click save, and then I’ll hit publish so that it’s available for me to take it to the next step. It gives you a little summary before you publish.
Assigning and Bundling Assessments
For those of you who know our Vector LMS pretty well, once you’ve created the quiz and you have all of that ready, your next step is to bundle that quiz into a qualification, or you can go ahead and assign it directly. I mentioned earlier that I had pre-structured a bundle. So, I’m going to go ahead and pull that up so you can see what this looks like. I have my HVAC technician competency assessment here. I showed you three other quizzes that I created. So, I’ve now structured these with a qualification and four different requirements for holding those quizzes, which gives me the capability to bundle all of these assessments or quizzes into one assignment. Now, when I go assign this to my learner, they’re going to see it on their training plan as one competency assessment that they can click through and take each of those quizzes. It doesn’t have to be to this level. You could just go assign one quiz right away, but I like the idea of this to show it to you so that you can see that there are different levels depending on your training strategy and the way that you could build and then release and assign these competency assessments.
Learner Experience: Taking an Assessment
From here, I’m going to skip over the assignment because I already have it assigned to my learner. I really want to focus on what the competency assessment would look like from building as an admin, which we just covered. Now I’m going to jump into the training tab platform, so I’m going to click the training tab here. Like I said, I’ve already assigned that HVAC technician competency assessment to myself. You can see here that it does not include the safety competency that I just created, but if I had gone through the steps of assigning, you would see that as a fourth option here. I just skipped over it for the sake of time. However, these competencies and competency assessments are built out the exact same way that I just built the safety assessment. It’s the same idea.
But I do want you to see what it looks like upon launch because once the learner is made aware that they have this assessment on their training, they’re going to come here and click “launch” to take that first quiz. When I launch the content, I’m going to get a message initially that’s going to let me know what the settings are for this particular quiz. As we determined when I walked through that safety quiz setup, I said I want it to be an eighty percent passing score, and I want them to be assigned automatically if they fail. So that’s what the learner is seeing here. If I don’t achieve the passing score, I’m going to be assigned these three items. This looks different than what we just built because it’s for electrical, not safety, but you get the idea, right?
I can begin to navigate through each of the questions. This particular quiz has fifteen questions from those three courses you just saw, and these questions are Vector-specific questions. I’ll go ahead and exit this specific example because I think you get the idea of what it might look like from a learner’s perspective. They will go through each of the competencies or quizzes that I’ve created for this particular area. Let’s say that I failed this electrical knowledge quiz. Those three courses that are going to be automatically assigned to me will show up under the section that says, “individually assigned activities.” If you notice, I also have an electrical tech competency assessment already on my dashboard, where I’ve completed that assessment further, and you can see here that I do have some activities that were assigned to me specifically from the failure of those assessments. See, I took a tools assessment, I failed it, and then it gave me some courses based on that failed assessment.
Tracking Results and Reporting
Alright. Now I want to jump over to one more area just to round out this full process that you could take as an admin, creating a competency assessment. You’ve created the quiz. You’ve assigned it to a learner. You’ve seen what it looks like as a learner to take that quiz and get assigned additional courses as a result of a failed quiz. Then back to an admin perspective, you want to track it. You want to see how it’s doing. I just want to show off one quick report. Out of the many reports we have, I think one that is really helpful for this particular process is our detailed test results report.
I’m going to go ahead and click on this. I have some parameters preset here based on a previous run because I wanted to, for the sake of time, have some of this already figured out for you. So, I’m going to click the view report, and it’s going to load here. The parameters that I have set are that the user is myself, and the activity is—oh, you can see it when I hover here—the Electrical Tech One competency assessment that I just showed you on my dashboard, I’d already taken, and I’d failed some. Those are the activities within that qualification assessment.
So, here are the details as a result. You can see that I did—as Jennifer, as the admin—decide that training was going to be assigned when the learner failed the assessment, and these are the specific courses that would be assigned as a result. Then here, you actually get really good details on the questions that were asked within the assessment and the learner’s specific results, whether they got the answer correct or incorrect, and then what the correct answer was. There is a lot of data and detail here. There are actually multiple pages because you can see this is the generator assessment that I assigned. This is a continuation of that. On the third page, you can see the tools assessment that was also assigned as part of the Electrical Tech One competency assessment. So, you can just go through and really dig in and see the results of that particular assessment.
Closing Remarks
I just want to say thank you again to our presenters for being here today and for the lively and educational webinar. And of course, thank you to our attendees for joining us. We know that your time is valuable, and we appreciate that you spent the last 40 minutes with us today. As mentioned at the beginning of the webinar, this recording will be sent to you along with the slides and a few educational resources.
If you’d like a quick overview of the tool discussed today, you can also review the Competency Assessment Tool brochure.
Have a great rest of your day, and thank you again for joining us today!
Thank you, everyone. Thanks, everyone.
