So, what are Smart Skills and Smart Assessments?

So, a Smart Assessment is a test to evaluate your proficiency with a particular job role skill. This type of test gets to a reliable score by adapting the question difficulty based on your performance on previous questions.

Once you complete a Smart Assessment, you cannot retake it for two days. This waiting period gives you enough time to complete training to make a noticeable difference in your score. And because these exams are adaptive, immediately retaking the exam isn't likely to change your score.

Each Smart Assessment can take about 10 or 20 minutes to complete and includes about 20 or 30 questions. Lab assessments can be anywhere from 30 minutes to two hours.

Each Smart Assessment measures only one job role skill, so you need to take several of them to get a complete picture of your proficiency in the technology or a concept.

Let's take a look at a Smart Skill to better understand its purpose. So, if you look at the Smart Skill, you can see it consists of training content. And you can see the full training duration here is 16 hours, so that's quite a lengthy period.

But, if I take this assessment and display a high level of expertise or knowledge on content like Python objects or flow control in Python, I can skip that content and go into the content that I may not be so proficient in. And that would shave off about one hour of my total training duration.

Now you can create a Smart Skill Program from the team view we saw before by simply clicking on a team and then clicking on Create a Program and selecting a Skill-Based Program, but this will only assign the program to this particular team.

We're now going to show you another section of the admin view that lets you create programs and assign them to multiple teams in your organization.

On the left-hand side of our admin view, we will select Assignments and if we click on that, we can see the programs that are currently in our organization. If we click on the New button here on the top right, we can see that we could either create a Content-Based Program, a Skill-Based program, or a Skill Assessment.

In this example, I'm going to select a Skill-Based Program, so I'm going to go ahead and click on Create new. And from here we could either assign it to the whole company, a certain job role, company members, team onboarding, a team, or individual team members. For this example, I will select a team and I will select three teams. So, I'll click on DevOps, IT Operations, and Engineering.

I'll go ahead and call this program “DevOps Smart Skill Program” and then click on Continue. I can then select a program here, so I'll type in “DevOps” and select DevOps Fundamentals. I could also select the skill that I want these teams to achieve and then click on Continue.

From here, I can either decide on a Weekly Commitment or a Fixed Duration. So, I'll change the fixed duration to something like 20 days and then click on Confirm and deploy. Click on Yes I am sure for the confirmation and now the program is deployed.

So, what are the benefits of Smart Skills and Smart Skill Assessments?

Let's take a look at this scenario. So here we have 7 Software Engineers who have been assigned by their admin a 3-hour Java course. Now if we do the quick math, that's 7 engineers times 3 hours, which equals to 21 hours. Hours that they could be spending on development projects.

Now say when these 7 engineers take the Smart Skill Assessment, we find that some scored one star and some scored two stars. Maybe those two-star engineers displayed a high proficiency on concepts like JavaScript arrays or working with Javascript's for loops. What happens now is that those two-star engineers can skip those Lessons and go on to topics that they may not have displayed such high proficiency on, basically cutting their learning time in half.

So, we have 2 engineers who got one star, so they'll have to take the full course, and 5 engineers who got two stars who will take half of the course. So, the new total that we're left with is 13 1/2 hours, which means we got 7 1/2 hours that we could devote to those looming projects.

So, in summary, Smart Skill Assessments and Smart Skill Programs can save you time, decrease the boredom from your learners who may not need to sit through lessons that they are already proficient in, and remove the headaches from the admins when creating learning programs since the platform will now create the program for them based on their proficiencies.

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