Training Toolkit

Skills assessment tools to help identify and fill gaps

Dana Norton Tech Republic

Published: 02 May 2002 16:48 BST

TechRepublic columnist Mike Sisco believes that many IT managers miss the boat when it comes to employee development because they don't know the skills possessed by their employees and have no plan to fill in skills gaps.

Investing in employee training not only increases team effectiveness, but it also often pushes individual employees to higher levels of achievement. As the president of MDE Enterprises, an IT management training and consulting company in Atlanta, Sisco knows how to assess employees' skills and locate gaps in their knowledge base.

He has created an IT employee skills assessment and training download that can help managers develop their own organisational assessment and training plan.

Reasons for a training plan

There are several compelling reasons for creating an assessment and training program. They include the following:

Training raises the cumulative skill level of your team.

Boosting a team's overall skills keeps you from hiring outside the organisation when new skills are needed for a project.

Training deepens a team's knowledge of critical skills.

Training improves the strength of each member so that when a project needs more resources, other members can help out.

You can add an assessment procedure and its corresponding training initiatives to an employee's annual performance reviews to measure an employee's training progress.

Overall, a training plan should boost a team's skills and allow your IT department to become a stronger unit of the organisation. Download Sisco's training assessment tools to help launch your evaluation and training program.

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He has created an IT employee skills assessment and training download that can help managers develop their own organizational assessment and training plan.