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15 Personal Skills You Need on the Job

December 30, 2006

Employers are looking for workers who have that special something: the skills, tendencies andattributes that help to keep productivity—and profits—up.What are they? Businesses are looking for employees with strong "personal" skills, according toACT research. Keep these in mind, because employerscertainly are.

Carefulness:

Do you have a tendency to think and plan carefully before acting? This helps withreducing the chance for costly errors, as well as keeping a steady workflow going.

Cooperation:

Willingness to engage in interpersonal work situations is very important in theworkplace.

Creativity:

You've heard of "thinking outside the box"? Employers want innovative people who bring a fresh perspective.

Discipline:

This includes the ability to keep on task and complete projects withoutbecoming distracted or bored.

Drive:

Businesses want employees who have high aspiration levels and work hardto achieve goals.

Good attitude:

This has been shown to predict counterproductive work behaviors, job performance and theft.

Goodwill:

This is a tendency to believe others are well-intentioned.

Influence:

Groups need strong leaders to guide the way. Influence includes atendency to positively impact social situations by speaking your mind and becominga group leader.

Optimism:

A positive attitude goes a long way toward productivity.

Order:

"Where did I put that?" A tendency to be well organized helps employees towork without major distractions or "roadblocks."

Safe work behaviors:

Employers want people who avoid work-related accidentsand unnecessary risk-taking in a work environment.

Savvy:

This isn't just about job knowledge, but knowledge of coworkers and theworking environment. It includes a tendency to read other people's motives fromobserved behavior and use this information to guide one's thinking and action.

Sociability:

How much you enjoy interacting with coworkers affects how well youwork with them.

Stability:

This means a tendency to maintain composure and rationality in stressfulwork situations.

Vigor:

This is a tendency to keep a rapid tempo and keep busy.

Article provided courtesy of ACT, an independent, nonprofit organization that provides assessment, research, information and program management services ineducation and workforce development. For more information on how to assess and build upon these and other "personal" skill areas—as well as "foundational" skillssuch as math,reading and writing—go towww.act.org/workkeys.*************************************************************************************

Measuring Training Effectiveness

July 30, 2007

By Dorn WilliamsTraining is a critical component in any organization's strategy, but organizations don't alwaysevaluate the business impact of a training program. Given the large expenditures for training inmany organizations, it is important to develop business intelligence tools that will helpcompanies improve the measurement of training effectiveness. These tools need to provide amethodology to measure, evaluate, and continuously improve training, as well as theorganizational and technical infrastructure (systems) to implement the methodology. Cross-functional and reporting and learning analytics provide important connections between themeasures of learning effectiveness offered by a learning management system (LMS) and thelarger enterprise metrics that indicate whether learning is transferred and positively affects business results.

Business Performance Impact

Unless a training program exists simply for the sake of training, results should be measured andmeasurements should include business performance data, not just training data. Includingselected metrics—such as sales, customer satisfaction, workplace safety, productivity and others —into a reporting strategy can help demonstrate where training has increased revenue or decreased costs. Measurements that consider performance improvements can provide a benchmark for training effectiveness. After implementing a training initiative or changing anexisting program, an organization can observe and record a change in performance. To evaluateretention rates, there should be a lag between the training and these behavior measurements.Many organizations are unable to evaluate their programs beyond the first two Kirkpatrick levels because they lack the tools to collect the data to make higher level evaluations. In part, LMSs,the most common repository for training data and mechanism to deliver training, make lower level evaluations easy but don't provide any tool for higher level evaluation. Most LMSsautomatically will track and report information required for Level One and Level Two analyses.Likewise, training programs can inexpensively and easily administer pre- and post-tests thatevaluate learning results (Level Two). When evaluating changes in student behavior and traininginfluence on business results, however, data collection requirements extend beyond coursedelivery.

Much of the data needed to bridge the gap between training and performanceexists in many organizations. Individual performance data exists in performancemanagement systems. Organizational data exists in marketing, sales, and financialsystems. Bridging this gap requires a technical infrastructure and reporting strategythat minimizes the administrative effort needed to collect and analyze the trainingand performance data together.But why are organizations still unlikely to evaluate training at Kirkpatrick's Level Three? System integration, one common point of failure, is critical. Many LMSvendors with a history as product companies have limited expertise in systemintegration that extends beyond learning systems and databases. Successfullymanaging performance-based training evaluation, however, requires expertise indata management and warehousing, a variety of corporate systems and databases,analytics, and Web-based application development.

Cross-Functional Reporting

A reporting and data management strategy that focuses on the LMS as thefoundation only compounds the system integration challenges that make