Identifying skill gaps and delivering reskilling solutions at scale

The client is an American multinational technology corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York and present in over 175 countries. It specializes in computer hardware, middleware, and software, and provides hosting and consulting services in areas ranging from mainframe computers to nanotechnology. The client’s goals to stay ahead of the curve mandated them continually finding ways to improve their tech processes. They sought scalable solutions to upskill their existing tech workforce in India.

What was the client trying to solve?

To enable such a workforce transformation, the client was in need of a tool to identify the precise reskilling needs for each employee and build a development plan. Thus, the client required a strategic partner who would understand and execute their objective into holistic reskilling plan across tech roles. Their asks were as follows:

Understanding organization-wide skill gaps:

The client also wanted to analyse the current skill sets internally assigned to job roles and assess employees’ positions with regards to those roles. They needed to revisit pre-defined skill repositories while gauging how many employees possessed those skills and to what extent.

Eliminating 90-degree feedback loop:

90-degree feedback sessions to one-on-one sessions that helped managers identify areas of improvement and measure progress. The client wanted to expand of the scope of the feedback mechanism by moving beyond these traditional methods.

A tool to identify training needs:

The most significant concern was not possessing the right tool that could help identify role-centric training needs in the organization. The company did not have the ideal methodology to deal with them. The company wanted to focus on evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of its employees to nurture and strengthen them holistically. The idea was to create training and development plans that could help empower every individual in the organization by having them learn hands-on.

 

The Solution

Having gained a detailed insight into the client’s development strategy, the experts at Yaksha devised a two-step scalable upskilling plan that could be delivered remotely.

Assessment Framework

A coding assessment platform with an extensive programming test library, replete with 100000+ tech-based question across 300 skills was offered to enable impactful assessments.

  • The user-friendly interface helped the managers set up assessments for the workforce across varying job roles instantaneously.
  • The diversity of questions helped the client gauge the employees’ technical concepts in every dimension, including future thinking.
    The score-based reports determined the ideal course to be taken by each employee.
  • A gap in performance and the need to upskill was measured. This critical exercise ensured that the current competencies of the tech workforce were broken down at a team, job-role, and individual level and then matched to the company’s future goals – this forward-looking approach intended to help employees acquire the right skills to reach their full potential.

Simulating a case study:

Having undergone a training program recommended by the entry assessments, the employees were put through a business simulation. The simulations were decided upon along with the client in order to ensure that it matched their business use cases and requirements. This would require the employees to solve a simulation and migrate the working solution as a project on to cloud.

  • The auto-graded simulator instantaneously evaluated employees on several parameters, such as code correctness, difficulty level, time and space complexities and other vital parameters.
  • The accurate test reports offered in-depth analytics of code and programming standards, enabling the decision-makers to predict the employees’ real-life skills at scale.
  • A thorough evaluation of the coding potential was free from bias and backed the managers’ decisions with optimum reliability and validity of coders’ actual potential.

The Impact

A strategic approach to assessing and bridging the gaps in the employees’ current skills ensured personal and professional growth while fully optimizing the upskilling and development process. A combination of MCQ-based and simulator coding assessments measured the existing skill competencies and the detailed reports offered deep insights into the employees’ strengths, weaknesses and development areas, aiding in a lucid reskilling program.

  • The client could reskill 1500+ employees remotely, using efficiently designed coding assessments.
  • The accurate report scores allowed client to identify precise reskilling needs and recommend courses to all employees
  • This highly accelerated reskilling program the client set them on a path of rapid digital transformation.

The way forward

As the client’s enterprise partner in evaluations, Yaksha continues to offer assessments to measure employee skills on various parameters. 

With Yaksha’s deep insights on the employee skillsets based on these extensive assessments, the client continues to measure the competency level of their employees and accordingly grant appraisals and determine their deployment into projects.  

"Yaksha helped our resources gain more knowledge, skills and learn about new developments that are related to the job role. The recorded sessions, guides and videos were very helpful for the assessments. It would be great if we could have subtitles/captions enabled to benefit our global resources."

- Patricia Carbonell

Talent Acquisation Partner, IBM

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