Large multinationals with complex structures have different needs when it comes to e-assessment platforms than SMEs with a flatter structure. For one, it is important that the e-assessment platform tests on every level of the business. No one wants to deal with frankensteining multiple platforms together to get the job done. Secondly, there is significantly more emphasis on scale and compliance when a company operates at the enterprise level. This needs to be reflected in the assessment platform.
This is where enterprise solutions come in: They are designed to integrate multiple facets of a company’s business through the exchange of information from various business process areas and related databases.
Let’s have a look at the 4 essential features your e-assessment platform should have for your enterprise business:
1. Role-based access control
Role-based access control (RBAC), is a mechanism that restricts system access. It involves setting permissions and privileges to enable access to authorized users. This benefits large organizations because they have many different employees with a variety of functions, and the leaders need to provide those employees with varying levels of access based on their roles and responsibilities.
RBAC is also known as role-based security because it protects sensitive data and information and ensures that employees can only access information they need to perform their job. Platforms such as Google or Meta have developed various permission levels where you can designate whether a user is an administrator, a specialist, or an end-user, and limit access to specific resources or tasks. An organization may let some individuals create or modify files while providing others with viewing permission only.
Your e-assessment platform should be completely customizable and contain all of the functions you need to test all levels of your organization, and RBAC can help you keep track of all the roles in your organization while keeping even the most sensitive information private.
2. Fit-for-purpose testing
Every employee in your business has a specific role they fulfill. Of course, in some instances, the functions one person performs in one department can overlap with another, but in most businesses each moving part of your organization has a specific, specialized role. Your testing platform should mirror this structure, and therefore fit-for-purpose testing should be a requirement for your business.
In order for a large company to ensure all of their employees are skilled and qualified, exams need to be designed to test those skills, not short-term retrieval of information. Some question types can encourage participants to regurgitate information or just outright guess the correct answer, meaning your exams aren’t actually guaranteed to measure competency, and as Zig Ziglar once said, “The only thing worse than training employees and losing them is to not train them and keep them”.
By using fit-for-purpose question types, you are guaranteeing that your exam-takers are utilizing different parts of their brain and engaging all of the skills they acquired in order to answer the questions, not guesswork.
3. Sharing is caring
In a large company, the ability to share item banks, collaborate with colleagues, and structure elaborate workflows is incredibly important to ensure that all aspects of the organization gain as much perspective as possible.
An Item Bank is a repository of test questions (Items) and any information pertaining to those items. In business testing for example, Items are defined by a credentialing, assessment program or job family such as Entry Level Certification, Advanced Certification and so on.
Creating items is most often the first step in test development. Item Banks need to be created before putting Items in, so it’s crucial to be able to share these with your colleagues and collaborate, not only to reduce workload, but also to allow for more thorough testing and ultimately to create better assessments.
4. Workflow – From creation to marking
How do you ensure that exam items are noted, started, assigned, tracked, and verified to completion? The answer is simple: with a workflow. In a large organization, defined and repeatable workflows reflect your business processes and help you efficiently create deliverables.
In a business context, workflows are considered essential parts of an organization along with IT, teams, hierarchies, and projects, and your exam platform should be no different. Built-in exam creation tools are important, but only half the job is getting done if the marking tools aren’t just as powerful. The built-in marking tool should allow you to annotate directly in the candidate responses, connect and mark rubrics, and set up advanced marking workflows.
Large companies should be able to not only ensure that all of their staff is expertly skilled and competent, but they should also be able to collaborate easily and establish a workflow that makes managing employees easy and painless.
