Jobs, responsibilities, and thus the skills and competencies necessary to perform those tasks are changing at a rapid pace. Employees are increasingly expected to continuously learn so that they can keep up with changes in their current job or retrain for new roles. Employers too, must constantly adjust their evaluations for job applications, performance reviews, or developing new training programs. PhD candidate Tanika Kenens has developed the AlterEdu tool to enable more efficient assessments. She will defend her dissertation on October 2.
The current evaluation methods and procedures, as well as how companies handle employee assessments, are due for a radical overhaul. Existing tools primarily focus on finding a suitable match for a current role, but this way of measuring does not align with the evolving requirements of the modern job market. Therefore, it’s crucial to rethink tools and assessments, including how, what, and when we measure people.
Development of new skills
Based on interviews from the field and scientific findings from various disciplines, Kenens developed a new tool-the AlterEdu tool-which aims to build a new assessment culture. The problem with current assessments and guidance is that the development of new tasks, skills, and responsibilities are often treated like a simple block tower. Additional blocks of knowledge or experience are added to make the tower higher, and thus "better". However, a skill is nothing like a single block. It more resembles a construction, a combination made of many, smaller building blocks, like "Legos".
AlterEdu tool
Therefore, simply building straight upwards on top of the construction, will not lead to the desired results. AlterEdu helps identify which "Lego blocks" a person has at their disposal, what the building plan looks like for the construction you need, and how well the blocks (the cognitive processes of the person) are a fit with the building plan (the job, the task, or the responsibility).
The assessment is based on people’s reaction to real-life situations based on their responses to open-ended questions. These responses are then compared with a reference group: Which cognitive processes are essential for the entire group, and what differences make one person better suited for Task A, while another excels at Task B?
