6/02/2014
Q.1 What will be the key growth factors in the online assessment segment in India?
The way I have been seeing the online assessment segment evolving in the digital era, employee data is going to drive a lot of future talent strategies. Online assessments provide organisations the tools and ability to record, analyse and draw timely and valuable insights from many highly reliable and consistent assessment measures, being administered and recorded in real-time across geographies. This will go a long way in changing the outlook of the corporates towards the application and perception of skills and cognitive and behavioural assessments in aiding people decisions. Achieving scale in real-time mass testing and immediate results and tracking is another prominent feature which a lot of assessment companies would want to capitalise upon to get into this growth trajectory. In this really dynamic and unpredictable market place, where achieving margins is everyone’s goal and every investment is being looked upon as a cost, linking assessment results to people results will justify the future of this business.
Q.2 Is the competence assessment services landscape in India on the cusp of a change?
Yes of course. In at least two ways:
(1) Understanding the fact that skills that helped us grow five years ago, may not lead organisations into the future. Organisations expect people across levels to be more involved in business decisions, which means, more problem-solvers, critical thinkers and decision-makers across the board who can take accountability and complete ownership in making sound decisions for the firm.
(2) Secondly technology has taken up the mantle to understand and solve most of our problems. The future will be determined by how we are going to assess those skills/competencies in real-time and use the employee data to make valuable insights related to talent pool hiring, controlling attrition and driving engagement based on facts and pattern never seen before. The way I see, the competency assessment services landscape is going to go digital in a big way.
Q3 What is your panacea for enhancing the quality of talent available in India in general and particularly in the context of supply-demand mismatch of employable knowledge workers in the IT industry?
Focus on the 4 Critical Skills or the 4C’s – Critical Thinking, Creativity, Communication and Collaboration of the new age workforce which will lead organisations to success in the 21st century. The focus should be holistic enough to expose, benchmark and develop talent on these skills so that we could get more drivers than passengers. What organisations need are insightful knowledge workers instead of transactional knowledge workers. That’s where the key lies.
One of our key offerings to the market encompasses the above four critical skills relevant for succeeding in today’s environment of being a solution centric knowledge worker. These skill-sets would be critical for the next rung of leadership of IT organizations that enable their work force to move from being engineers to being consultants.
Q. 4 What are some of the “high demand” services offered by assessment solutions companies like Pearson TalentLens?
Well there has been a drastic and progressive change in expectation from assessment solutions companies to graduate to offering end to end remedial solutions instead of restricting themselves to diagnostic services alone. Pearson being the world leader in learning space has taken this challenge head-on and embraced this critical fact. The addition of GlobalEnglish– one of the world’s most widely used cloud-based learning solution for Business English, to our portfolio has really seen us becoming an aggressive player in the business communication skills’ landscape, one of the most critical space cutting across several sectors and functions. Pearson TalentLens’s Leadership Transformation Program which is an end-to-end competency-based consulting solution based on the DTI Framework (Diagnose, Transform, Impact) for Young Leaders and Aspirants in the Junior and Middle Management Levels aims at maximizing job performance through a business impact process design which is quite close to organizations expectations.
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