Employees hear ‘assessment’ and associate it with the tests they endured in school. It’s important to break that association, either by renaming the term itself or explaining why you’re implementing assessments to begin with.
You’re a member of a support team. Every quarter, engineering rolls out a new integration, and you’re responsible for knowing all its ins and outs, and helping users become empowered product masters. You attend trainings, and complete training modules. Then what? How do you know that you’re fully up to speed, other than to wait for a customer to ask a question you don’t know the answer to? And how does your manager know that they’re supporting you in a way that’s effective?
Assessments are tools, simply. They allow learners to self-diagnose what they’re foggy on, and provide important data for learning and development managers to iterate the next version of training to be more effective. If everyone gets question six wrong, you can look at that question’s topic, and determine what additional gaps need to be filled. Tamp down on anxiety for the test-averse by communicating that your assessments are for self-evaluation and help only, not measures of job performance or capability.
Assessment Doesn’t Require A Big Budget 💸
Often, I see small companies assume that they need big company tools to achieve their learning goals. If your team is 15 people and you have one trainer, do you really need Articulate? And will they have time to learn and use the software if they’re fulfilling the traditional startup job requirement of wearing many hats? That hefty licensing fee might be better put towards other expenses more essential for an earlier, smaller company. It’s entirely possible to deliver solid assessment, with backend analytics to show you exactly where and how your learners are struggling, for free or very low cost.
Subversive Assessment 🙈
Ways to evaluate competency and check for understanding without overtly administering traditional tests and quizzes include:
Flashcards: let your employees gauge their own competency while practicing key terms and concepts. The COVID digital revolution left us with some great free tools to set up flashcard decks, such as Quizlet and Memozora. These can be set up even if you don’t have an LMS, sent out in to-do tasks for individuals in your existing project management software.
Gamification: set up live team challenges to use friendly competition to your advantage, or create async games with results that can be tracked in your LMS using H5P. Lumi is my favorite free H5P editor. When files are uploaded to an LMS (Moodle, WordPress, and Drupal all work with H5P), you’ll be able to see the history of each session completed by learners.
Live Roleplays: have your learners test out their product knowledge on a pre-designed scenario, either via face-to-face human interaction or in a simulation of a product issue escalated via fake support ticket, and see if they can solve the user’s problem with accuracy and efficiency.
Wrong Answers Should Mean Support, Not Penalty 🤝
Lastly, with any learning program, you want to make sure that your learners feel safe to disclose when they don’t know something. Set clear expectations for what will happen if they do poorly on the assessment, and never make it a disciplinary action or performance improvement plan related to termination as your first result when rolling out new training programs. Keep in mind that often, their failure to know something can be a reflection on your failure to properly set them up for success. Give clear timelines for when they need to be fully competent on material, and continuously iterate your assessments and activities to hit home on the parts your learners repeatedly stumble through.