Meeting your Objectives with Online Testing Applications

By Peggie Brown, for Hostedware Corporation

In a rapidly changing and highly competitive environment involving ever increasing new technologies, government mandates, compliance regulations and skyrocketing costs, today's smart business owners and organization leaders must take full advantage of ways for decreasing costs while expanding the knowledge of their work force. Sounds impossible? Read this article and then decide if you are ready to take steps to lower your corporation's recruiting, training and education costs while at the same time, meeting or exceeding your training objectives and offering your employees increased flexibility and a less intimidating testing environment.

Avoid Costly Hiring Mistakes
Unfortunately, in an environment of highly creative and plainly false resumes claiming education from unqualified or non-existent sources, the hiring process becomes riffed with difficulties and filled with the unknown. You may be thinking of using a dartboard for your next round of employee selection, but we think there might be a better alternative. Quite simply the best way to evaluate applicants for skills prior to spending time in the interview process is to test the applicant for the desired skill set.

The cost of making a mistake by hiring the wrong person is far higher in time and resources than doing it right from the start. With dynamic and cost effective online software applications, you can create your applicant testing modules (fully branded with your corporate identification) one time, administer to as many applicants as necessary at any time you choose and receive immediate results. No more waiting to sift through and score tests. With computer generated testing, you can receive the applicant's score within seconds of their test completion. By doing this, you can experience immediate cost savings by only interviewing truly qualified applicants.

With full-featured online testing applications, your test modules can be updated or you can simply reorder questions at any time and anywhere as long as you have an internet connection. Over time you can track and compare employees' initial test scores at the time of hire to their actual job performance. You can see trends indicating those with the highest testing scores out perform those with lower scores. Or you may notice that those testing well in certain areas tend to be better all around employees, highly motivated and excellent on the job performance. This data analysis provides you information for hiring the very best personnel for your organization in the future.

Increase Your Assets
Now that you hired personnel capable of fulfilling your corporation's requirements, let's look at ways for increasing their productivity and knowledge, training them for advancement and new responsibilities. A skilled workforce contributes significantly to the corporate bottom line. Equipping your employees with practical information and additional skills applicable to their work environment only makes good business sense.

Almost every corporation today is besieged with government regulations and mandates for ensuring a safe and sane work environment, certifications and/or licensing for specific professional fields (engineering, information technology, medical, real estate, etc.). Demonstrate your commitment and corporate compliance with government regulated work place issues such as sexual harassment, safe working habits and other statutory compliance issues by building the necessary training modules once. With online testing applications, it is efficient and cost effective to evaluate your employees' awareness and adherence to corporate policy through annual testing.

instead of reinventing the wheel every time you hire a new employee or when one of your employees needs to upgrade or update their skills, use online testing applications for consistent and constant skill building. Because the test is hosted online in a secure environment, each employee studies and tests as needed according to the employee's schedule.

You can also link your reading library, videos and other training materials with the tools provided by your online testing solutions provider. This presents employees with a self-paced course and the ability for recording the course materials completed and those still left for completion. Managers quickly see employees who lag behind and can lend encouraging reminders of expected completion dates. When course materials are completed, the employee completes the online test and the database automatically records the scoring.

Cost Effective - Organizations of ANY Size
Large corporations such as McDonalds found HostedTest invaluable for evaluating their employees' qualifications for advancement. But these applications are NOT ONLY for the large corporations. They provide even small businesses an affordable vehicle for employee evaluation and identification of future training needs.

Best of all, online testing applications avoids the cost of travel, meals and expensive seminar fees along with the costs of having employees away from the work place. Corporations are moving to making online training and testing available based on their needs rather than the timing and location of seminar planners. Even if organizations normally use in-house training, they can save the cost of having training staff available at all hours of the day and hijacking large groups of their work force for seminar attendance.

Another benefit of online testing applications is the ability to evaluate the effectiveness of training requiring live demonstrations or hands-on by using a computer generated test for final evaluation of the learning accomplished. The key here is knowing immediately if the specific training met the objectives.

Certification Testing
Many professional societies and organizations now offer low cost or free training materials and information for maintaining certification and/or licensing. Corporations quickly and effectively evaluate online training offered by these various associations through allowing employees a choice from a variety of training resources. Online testing applications play a key role here since upon completion of the training, employees complete the online test, allowing feedback to both employee and employer regarding the effectiveness of this learning experience.

The organization then receives and retains valuable analytical data apprising them of the benefit received (increased skill set of employees) versus the cost paid for the training.

Summary
Both corporations and educators continue the move towards online testing and evaluation tools. With the proper tools, each group gains valuable experience regarding the most cost-effective training. Moreover, these tools produce data for easy analysis in such cost efficiencies that even small businesses now are able to take advantage of online testing and training.

Make your training and testing materials available wherever your employees are located and at their convenience; then watch productivity rise while avoiding the cost of travel, board and expensive seminar fees.

Peggie Brown, experienced paralegal, freelance author and founder of Katsuey's Legal Gateway (www.katsuey.com).

Hostedware Corporation (www.hostedware.com) is a pioneer in providing online software solutions for research, education and performance improvement. Hosted Survey and Hosted Test are used by human resources professionals, market researchers, education and training organizations and membership associations worldwide.

Contact us at Customer Service to learn more about these cost-effective, self-configurable and easy to use tools.

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