Optimizing Bench Workforce with Strategic Upskilling and Reskilling

The client is a multinational professional services partnership headquartered in London and is considered one of the Big Four accounting firms. They primarily provide assurance which includes financial audit, tax, consulting and advisory services to their clients. Like many of the larger accounting firms in recent years, they have expanded into markets adjacent to accounting, including strategy, operations, HR, technology, and financial services consulting. With the client rapidly expanding their services, they needed to move their employees who were on bench for long time for reskilling and project allocation. Thus, they needed a strategic partner who would help identify precise reskilling needs for each employee and chart development plans that would contribute towards achieving their tech transformation goals.

What was the client trying to solve?

The client’s increasing presence and goals to stay ahead of the technology curve mandated finding ways to improve its tech processes continually. While they had clarity on their upskilling goals, translating them to sustainable actionable strategy was taxing. This meant that they needed assessment for specific tech domain and competencies to determine the extent to which the employees needed to be developed further. As a result, they needed a strategic partner that could employ innovation to deal with the following:
Insights for L&D:
One of the most significant concern was not possessing a methodology to identify role-centric training needs. They wanted to focus on evaluating strengths and weakness of their benched workforce, create training and development plans to nurture and strengthen them. The technology-based platform had to exceed the current industry standards of evaluation, expecting the platform to offer accurate and detailed reports to understand their employees’ skill-sets.
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 the scope of the feedback mechanism by moving beyond these traditional methods.
Proctoring solutions with anti-cheating features:
The client also needed a reliable and secure proctoring solution to conduct fair assessments at a large scale. This was keeping in line with the organisation’s zero-tolerance policy for any kind of plagiarism and cheating.
Understanding organization-wide skill gaps:
The client also wanted to analyze 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.

The Solution

The client evaluated various platforms and vendors for their specific requirements and approached Yaksha for an all-inclusive solution. After various discussions and demonstrations, they found our Talent Mobility solution an effective strategy for upgrading their L&D strategy.

Creating an Elaborate Assessment Framework:
The first step in addressing their challenge was to understand and identify tech roles they were targeting to upskilling. Having understood this, our team of subject matter experts defined all sub-competency required for all the roles and designed critical milestones for these assessment. The tech assessments combined an array of MCQ as well as application and knowledge-based problems. The extensive test library, replete with over 1M+ questions across 300 skills enabled them to devise impactful assessments.

  • The diversity of the questions helped the bank gauge the employees’ understanding of technical concepts in every dimension required for the required job-role, along with their future thinking.
  • The score-based reports would determine the ideal learning paths to be taken by each employee.

Identifying areas for development:
A gap in performance and the need to upskill was measured. This exercise ensured that the competencies were broken down at an individual, job-role, and team level and matched it to the company’s goals.

  • The auto-graded assessment instantaneously measured employees on several parameters like code correctness 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-world skills
  • The evaluation was free from bias and would help managers’ back their decisions with optimum reliability.

Case study-based project on cloud labs:
The client also benefited from our extensive code lab that allowed skill testing in real-world scenarios and industry setting. Powered by MakeMyLabs, these code labs acted as sandbox to implement case studies helping them make decisions based on accurate, factual and analytical data. The cloud labs allowed the client to Launch in-browser coding terminals and work on projects without any extensions, downloads or Port22 access.

Integration with LMS for Role-based Training: The client was using a popular LMS for their training needs. To give stakeholders access to all information pertaining to learning, the assessment was integrated with their LMS and provide all data in one place. The API integration also would recommend courses and learning paths based on assessment results. Additionally, an SSO process helped the employee take the assessments from within their LMS, an ecosystem that was faimiliar to them.

The Impact

The transparent, bias-free and time-saving package fully digitized their technical upskilling and development process. A combination of MCQ-based and simulated coding assessments measured the existing skill competencies.
  • The skill assessment helped the client identify and reskill 1500+ employees
  • 90% of benched workforce was upskilled and moved to new active projects
  • The accurate report scores allowed the client to identify precise reskilling needs and recommend courses to individual employees
  • The feedback process, upon completion, offered insights into areas that could be worked upon through group training and personal efforts.
  • The auto-graded cloud labs allowed the client to evaluate on-the-spot coding proficiency

The way forward

Based on the success of the exercise to move their benched workforce, the client will be partnering with Yaksha to extend similar initiatives for high potential and succession planning. Additional tools, such as competency-based interviews and other customized assessments, are being added to the gambit. We will also be assisting them in undertaking capability assessment and extending other initiatives to their branches across the globe.

" We used Yaksha’s assessments to build a company-wide competency matrix. This helped us evaluate our employees’ skills objectively and allowed for fair appraisals and have transformed our appraisal cycles. "

- HR Manager

About Yaksha

Yaksha Assessment Platform can help your organisation build customised assessments to enable you to hire, upskill, and engage employees across different technologies. With us you can create assessments in 70+ programming languages and skills. Our bank of 3 lakh+ multiple choice questions can help you assess deeply for a range of tech roles. Whether it is campus hiring you’re looking for or competency matrix, we have got you covered. We are your best bet for a tech assessment solution – simple, fair and efficient.

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