Assessments provide a firm foundation for literacy training.
When it comes to developing people, assessments must be the first step in the process. If you want to plan any training for employees, you need to know what you’re dealing with. Not doing so is like baking a cake without a recipe and just looking at a picture of a cake.
Assessments are aimed specifically at assessing English and Maths literacy. For example, psychometric assessments are influenced by a person’s language capabilities because one can’t answer a question properly if one’s vocabulary is not good enough. So this is a baseline assessment that serves as a yardstick regarding an employee’s English and Maths. For you to plan any training over and above ABET, you need to know what you’re dealing with. Put another way, you need to know what cake you want to bake before you start baking it because that determines what ingredients you need.
Start your assessments now!
Now is a good time of the year to do assessments. If you get assessments done before October or November, you can use November and December to plan your training, do assessment feedback and plan what needs to happen so you can start training in January or February.
If, however, you start this process in January, you will only start training in March. Companies would therefore be well advised to get this process out of the way so that they can start training early in the new year. This is therefore the time of the year to do assessments. Companies have understandably not been able to do assessments for the last two years because of the pandemic. Considering that we’re going back to more normal things, it’s a good time to do assessments again and plan for next year.
You can’t put somebody on training if you don’t know what literacy skills they have. Doing an assessment takes about three hours and is affordable. It’s money well spent because you then have sound data to plan correctly.
If you’re not sure of the skills of your workforce, look at whether they have a grade nine or matric certificate. When they communicate or read, are they struggling? Can they read emails and notice boards with ease?
It’s good to start to
establish the level of skills of your employees in your company as training is important. When employees become proficient in English and Maths, you know you’ve got a starting point for a career plan over a few years.
The first step in the learning journey is however doing an assessment. Some plans just place employees in a learnership or training programme yet they’re not competent. So they sit in for any training because they weren’t really assessed to see if they are ready or competent to be trained for a particular qualification or put on a training programme they want to be on. It’s therefore a sensitive situation to approach. It’s therefore not advisable to start with any training before doing an assessment.
The positive side of assessments
Using assessments to identify what’s wrong with an employee is a negative approach to assessments. The positive approach is encouraging people to learn. When people come into a company with a grade five and then go up in terms of assessment because they have been encouraged to learn, they pick up things in the company.
Marinda Clack is an Expert Training and Development Advisor at Triple E Training.
