A company’s strength is determined by its employees’ capabilities. When employees lack the necessary skills, it’s easy to fall behind. That’s why understanding your workforce’s skill level is not just important but crucial in helping your business grow and succeed.
From reducing turnover and increasing retention to improving customer satisfaction, knowing your team’s strengths and weaknesses helps you make informed decisions that benefit your employees and your bottom line. Here’s why it’s important and how you can effectively assess your workers’ skills.
Recognizing the Skill Levels of Your Workforce: Why it Matters
In the skilled trades industry, many challenges can impact your bottom line—high employee turnover, frequent callbacks, and ineffective training, to name a few. These problems often arise from not knowing your workforce’s skill levels.
In the skilled trades industry, many challenges can impact your bottom line—high employee turnover, frequent callbacks, and ineffective training, to name a few. These problems often arise from not knowing your workforce’s skill levels.
- Assign the Right Technician to Each Job: Ensure that the best-suited technician handles specific jobs, improving efficiency and customer satisfaction.
- Increase Employee Retention and Reduce Turnover: Employees are more likely to stay with a company that invests in their development through targeted training programs and transparent career development paths.
- Optimize Talent Acquisition Success: Make informed hiring decisions and reduce training costs with a detailed skills inventory.
- Provide Targeted Learning for Struggling Employees: Identify skill gaps and offer customized training to help employees improve their performance.
- Improve Customer Ratings and Reduce Callbacks: Skilled employees are more likely to complete jobs correctly the first time, leading to higher customer satisfaction and fewer callbacks, boosting profit margins.
A skills assessment is not just a tool; it’s a source of empowerment. It’s crucial for maintaining a competitive edge, ensuring long-term success, and generating a positive ROI. Understanding and managing your team’s skills development can drive efficiency, enhance employee satisfaction, and boost your bottom line, giving you a sense of control and confidence in your business’s future.
Measuring the Skill Levels of Your Technicians
In the skilled trades industry, gauging skill levels has traditionally been done through on-the-job observations. However, new online assessment tools like Interplay’s learning skills assessment program offer a more efficient and effective solution. This type of assessment helps you:
- Understand the skill levels of your team and each individual
- Turn weaknesses into strengths using customized course recommendations
- Create detailed skills inventories
- Identify areas for targeted training
By leveraging assessments, you can make informed decisions that drive efficiency and productivity for your business.
The Challenge of Establishing Benchmarks and Metrics for Skills Assessments
Before undertaking a workforce skills assessment, one of the biggest challenges is establishing universal benchmarks and skill measurement metrics, one of the most common training challenges large companies face.
A common vocabulary for describing skill levels is essential. Traditionally, determining a technician’s abilities involved subjective assessments, which can vary greatly. Today, the focus is on creating objective, scalable standards.
To approach this, consult industry experts to define the essential knowledge and skills required at different levels. Developing systematic and comprehensive standards that rank skills from basic to advanced is crucial. These standards should be testable and ensure scalability so they can be applied universally across different teams and job roles.
Establishing these benchmarks can create a reliable system for evaluating and comparing your technicians’ skills. This approach provides clarity and helps set expectations and goals for employee development, avoiding training pitfalls. By steering clear of these potential obstacles, you can feel secure and reassured in your team’s growth and development.
Interplay’s Solution: Enhancing Career Development with Powerful Skills Assessments
Interplay Learning offers comprehensive skills assessments, including multiple-choice questions designed by expert tradespeople. These quizzes assess skills across seven trades:
Each trade skills assessment question is randomized on our career development platform to ensure accuracy and fairness. Both you and the technician receive immediate results and tailored course recommendations, allowing for quick identification and addressing of skill gaps.
Interplay’s online assessments are accessible on any device, making it easy for your team to complete them anytime, anywhere. These assessments help you quickly identify skill gaps and provide the necessary skilled trades training path to ensure your team always performs at its best. With Interplay, your workforce development can improve significantly!
Advantages of Interplay’s Skills Assessments for Workforce Growth
Create a Skills Inventory
Your business thrives on the success of your technicians. Underperforming branches, callbacks, and poor customer satisfaction are often linked to skill levels and training challenges. Interplay’s skills assessments help gauge the technical knowledge of your workers—whether new or tenured—and provide a skills inventory. This lets you immediately understand your team’s strengths and weaknesses, ensuring the right people are in the right roles.
Improve Hiring Decisions
Save time and money hiring and promoting the right people. Interplay’s skills assessments provide a deeper insight into candidates’ abilities than resumes alone. By assessing skills during hiring or talent acquisition, you get an objective evaluation of each worker’s starting point, leading to more informed and effective hiring decisions. This efficiency in your hiring process can make you feel productive and effective in building your team.
Reduce Turnover
Mapping training and learning paths to career leveling helps employees gain the knowledge they need to advance in their careers. Skills assessments can also help match employees’ skills to their pay, ensuring consistency by basing job leveling and promotions on mastered skills. This approach fosters growth and achievement, reducing turnover and increasing employee satisfaction.
Boost Productivity
Mapping training and learning paths to career leveling helps employees gain the knowledge they need to advance in their careers. Skills assessments can also help match employees’ skills to their pay, ensuring consistency by basing job leveling and promotions on mastered skills. This approach fosters growth and achievement, reducing turnover and increasing employee satisfaction.
Increase Your Bottom Line
Well-trained technicians drive revenue, profitability, and growth. When your team understands why they are training and how it benefits them, they become more engaged and productive. This improves their performance and contributes significantly to your company’s bottom line.
About Interplay’s Career Development Platform
Ramp and On-boarding Paths
Interplay helps you provide structured ramp and onboarding paths to get new hires up to speed quickly. Their online skilled trades training program reduces rookie mistakes, increases independence, boosts confidence, and reduces turnover. Ramping correctly through proper training can accelerate company growth.
Promotion Paths
Interplay’s platform gives you the tools to help connect skills mastery with promotion paths. Employees can see clear milestones for advancement, which boosts morale and motivation. This approach helps ensure that promotions are based on demonstrated skills rather than tenure.
Certification and Safety Training
Interplay provides options for certification prep training to help workers gain necessary industry credentials and certifications such as NATE, OSHA, CPO, and EPA 608. This is one of the most effective ways to elevate your workforce development program. It also helps to boost your workers’ confidence and ensures compliance with safety regulations, protecting employees and the company.
Addressing Problem Areas
Regular skills assessments for trades help identify specific gaps and problem areas. Their career development platform then provides targeted skilled trades training to shore up these gaps, improving overall performance and reducing the likelihood of mistakes.
Leveraging Technology
Interplay leverages technology such as virtual reality training, online 3D simulation training, and other digital tools such as tablets and laptops to provide engaging and effective training experiences. VR and simulation-based learning have been proven to drive training adoption in the skilled trades, and they can help for example, HVAC technicians train more effectively.
Simulation-based training also proficiently bridges the gap between theoretical learning and practice. A 3D learning environment improves troubleshooting and makes learning more interactive and accessible, helping employees train anytime, anywhere, on any device.
Take Your Business to the Next Level: Interplay’s Skills Assessment
Issued by ESCO Group, HVAC Excellence’s Employment Ready Certifications help assure employers that a learner has the knowledge necessary to enter the workforce as an HVAC technician. The certification is awarded after completion of a standardized exam.
What You Can Do with an HVAC Excellence Employment Ready Certification
Knowing your technicians’ skill levels is the key to satisfying your customers, boosting your bottom line, and strengthening your teams. With Interplay’s comprehensive skills assessments, you can help your technicians gain the skills they need to succeed.
Take the first step today and contact Interplay for a demo. See how simple it can be to identify skill gaps in individuals and teams and then deliver individualized instruction across various skilled trades.
