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Assessment Standards

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by palmerm

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I am attempting to evaluate our IT staff insofar as their actual skill level. Is there a rubric out there that may have what I am looking for that could measure their professional "worth"? So far I have looked at the objectives for many professional exams and have attempted to create my own. I wanted to know if anyone else has found (or uses) something to accomplish this.

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by timwalsh

You are probably headed down the best path, which is to create your own assessment system.

What this system will look like will depend on what your goals are. If your goal is to determine what skills an individual has or doesn't have, your system may have one look. If your goal is to determine relative ranking of individuals for periodic evaluation purposes, your assessment system may have an entirely different look.

From your question, it sounds like your goal is more to determine what skills individuals actually have. Based on that assumption, here are some suggestions:

1. Don't try to create or use any type of omnibus test that includes every skill an IT person can possible have. The properly assess something this far reaching you would need a test that has several thousand questions (not my idea of a fun afternoon).
2. As a manager or supervisor, you probably have the best idea of what skills your IT staff needs to function efficiently in your organization. Use those "required skills" as a starting point. You don't need to necessarily develop all the questions on your own. There are many, many practice tests/study sites on the Internet. Pick and choose appropriate questions from these sites for inclusionin your assessment "test."
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by timwalsh

3. Include some sort of "hands-on" evaluation. Don't rely solely on a written test. This "hands-on" evaluation might take several forms. It may take the form of simply observing a technician as he goes about solving a problem as part of his everyday duties. This would allow you to determine his troubleshooting skills as well as knowledge of a particular piece of hardware or software. I could take the form of inducing a common problem on a test computer, describing symptoms he might get from a non-technical computer user, and having the tech troubleshoot and fix the problem. It might take the form of simply describing a problem to a tech and have him explain how he would go about solving the problem.

Some people excel at taking written tests and can achieve high scores by guessing and through the process of elimination. By including "hands-on" testing, you get a better picture of actual skills rather than ability to guess.

This method I have just described is a modification of the system the US Army uses to test every soldier, where a set of common skills that EVERY soldier must have is determined, and everyone is tested against these skills with both written and ?hands-on testing.?

Assuming that everyone on your staff doesn?t perform the exact same function, you can create further assessment tests for each functional area (i.e. help desk, network support, technician, email administrator, etc.) to ensure individuals have the skills YOU think they need.
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by timwalsh

By studying the results of your assessment, you should get an idea of which individuals may have skills over and above your basic requirements. You will have to be creative in trying to draw out what these skills actually are. One method might be to use the entire practice test for one or more certifications. If you have a decent budget you might invest in several of the Transcender series of practice exams, as these are some of the best I have seen and are available on a wide range of subjects.

As I?m sure you have guessed by now, there is no way that you can conduct a thorough assessment in a short period of time. Unless you have absolutely NOTHING better to do (which I very rarely find to be the case), you are probably looking ata process that will take several weeks, if not months.

I wish you good luck

by palmerm

Thanks for your answer. I did a fairly extensive seach on the Internet before I asked the question. It is too bad there was nothing already out there. I will plug away at creating my own assessment form.

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