How a revamp of talent assessment might help close the massive skills gap and end the labour shortage.

• Traditional assessments have failed to match talent to occupations, resulting in a large skills gap among workforces.
  
• A plethora of credentialing and discriminatory hiring practises add to the difficulty of finding good people.
• Competency-based evaluations, for example, use modern assessment methodologies to match recruitment to capabilities rather than credentials.

Despite the fact that there are 6.5 million unemployed people in the United States, there are approximately 11 million job opportunities, indicating a large skills gap in today's industry.

Meanwhile, the Great Resignation is in full swing, fueled by toxic workplaces and unresolved grief from the pandemic's two years of existence.

Traditional techniques of evaluating talent through traditional assessments are no longer enough; to overcome this dilemma, a new modern strategy to selection based on competency-based assessments is required.

A serious labour shortage

Only 1% of executives feel that new workers are properly skilled for their jobs, according to surveys. The introduction of the "micro-credential," bite-sized learning long utilised by technical schools and the commercial sector but rebranded by universities, colleges, and online MOOC providers as innovation, has been the most unique solution to address the problem.

The current state of affairs is nothing short of a labour shortage. Incorporate what we know about the future of work into the equation. Changes in demographics are resulting in a boom in the care sector, with 40 percent of new jobs projected in the next five years. In Ontario, Canada, one out of every five employment will be in the trades, and various studies estimate that the majority of pupils in primary school today will work in jobs that do not yet exist.

As of February 2021, about 1,000,000 certification paths were available to American students. Is it the hiring manager's responsibility to know the distinctions between ten different job applications with ten different credentials?

The issue with traditional evaluation

Traditional means of evaluation have effectively been a set of assumptions, from academic testing to employment selection.

It is considered that if you pass a test, you comprehended the module's material; if you pass a final exam, you comprehended the entire course's content; if you graduate from an educational institution, you are marketable; and if you interview well, you can do the job. The combined danger of these assumptions, on the other hand, is staggering.

There are two types of assessments in general. When the assessment is a learning tool, the first can be called an assessment "for" learning. A group project that culminates in an oral presentation and places assessment at the centre of the learning experience, for example, is important, even if it is incomplete in its typical application.

The second type is referred to as a "learning" evaluation. These are standardised examinations and exams that encourage the habit of cramming, aggravating structural hurdles and incorporating discrimination into the assessment process. This form of evaluation is common in professional circles, and it has the potential to make or break the futures of all types of learners, including teenagers, young adults, and professionals.

Exams in the classroom

Exams with high stakes, frequently worth up to 60% of a grade, are a student's make-or-break moment. Every semester, a student may take four or more of these high-stakes tests. Nonetheless, we are aware of the following:

— Multiple-choice exams are ineffective as ability tests.

— Multiple-choice tests are frequently found to be biassed.

– "Excellent test-taking" is a skill that does not always equate to employability.

— Jobs post-pandemic necessitate teamwork, communication, dynamic problem solving, and resourcefulness, all of which would be labelled "cheating" on high-stakes tests.

Assessments in the recruitment process

We continue to conduct risky assessments in the workplace for recruitment and career advancement. Candidates' resume style and interview performance are frequently used to judge their worth as they are recruited and interviewed.

Consider the ten candidates who applied for one position, each with their own set of qualifications. According to statistics, just one person may be qualified for the job; if they were hired using AI-powered application tracking tools, this could be unfair and ineffective.

Some companies use exams in the hiring process, yet even here, crucial job skills are overlooked. These assessments are frequently high-stakes and time-sensitive, and they inhibit teamwork, research, and innovation, all of which are important qualities in today's professional positions.

In comes skills-based recruiting, the newest recruitment buzzword, which in theory looks noble. The goal is to look beyond a person's previous work experience and affiliations to find transferable talents that may be applied to new positions in different industries.

Many occupations, however, still require a bachelor's degree, and many companies still look for contextual regional experience. Despite policymakers' best intentions, there are innumerable cases of outstanding individuals who lack "Canadian experience," preventing them from progressing in their careers.

Assessments in the workplace

After a candidate is employed, they are frequently sent for training and development, which is done for a variety of reasons, including necessity and improving loyalty and retention. They obtain professional credentials after passing a multiple-choice exam.

Budgets for learning and development (L&D) are frequently black holes, and calculating the return on investment (ROI) on L&D initiatives is difficult at best and elusive in general. Was there anything the staff learned during their training? Did they apply their expertise in a way that supported their employer's market-specific needs? Most of the time, we don't know. However, we believe they have.

Then there are competency-based examinations.

If we don't modify the way we conduct assessments, nothing will change. With hundreds of billions of dollars at stake in North America alone, the skills deficit is a significant problem.

Surprisingly, 31% of college graduates from the Class of 2020 are still unemployed more than a year after graduation. There appears to be an abundance of credentialed labour and a significant lack of skilled labour at the same time. However, there are alternatives.

Assessment systems like VALID-8 offer legally defensible competency evaluations to an ISO-evaluated level of competency, effectively guaranteeing skills and allowing institutions and employers to engage in meaningful skills-based recruiting strategies. Furthermore, personality tests from companies like FitFirst Technologies combine advanced behavioural science approaches with job search patterns to ensure that the appropriate people get the right positions straight away.

Although competency-based learning is not new, it is rarely accompanied with meaningful competency-based evaluation. We have continued to invest in dynamic and complicated technologies that have failed to reach our goals time and time again. We've kept evaluating candidates and learners in the same way we did over a century ago.

It bears repeating: unless we modify our appraisal, we will not be able to realise our society', communities', and economies' genuine potential.