How to Use Skills Tests in Leadership Training

1. How to Use Skills Tests in Leadership Training

2. The benefits of leadership skills training are well-documented. By providing your company’s leaders with quality training opportunities, you can expand their skill sets, help them lead more effectively, combat turnover, and improve overall business performance. In the past, some businesses struggled to tap into these benefits because their training programs were ineffective. Specifically, these organizations were unable to accurately measure the skillsets of their leaders. When designing programs, they were “flying blind” and had no quantifiable means of gauging training efficacy. Talk about a recipe for disaster. Fortunately, you can avoid these classic pitfalls associated with leadership skills training by leveraging skills tests. Here’s how you can implement them into your training program. Why Use Leadership Soft Skills Tests? Before we get into the specifics of using skills tests in your leadership training program, let’s discuss why you should be using these effective tools. Skills tests provide a means of measuring the abilities and aptitudes of your team. You can use skills tests to measure both hard and soft skills. To recap, hard skills are job-specific abilities that are typically technical. Conversely, soft skills are abilities that are not job-specific. Examples of soft skills include conflict resolution, emotional intelligence, change management, and logical thinking.

3. By using skills tests, you can obtain quantifiable data on the proficiencies of your supervisory staff. These insights will reveal each team member’s strengths and weaknesses. Using this information, you can better apply each staff member’s strengths and provide training opportunities to shore up their respective weaknesses. Upskilling your organizational leaders will have a positive cascade effect on the entire company. Great leaders will be able to unlock the true potential of the people they manage. They will also be better at showing empathy, managing conflicts, and demonstrating appreciation for employees. The latter is particularly important, as 79% of people who quit their jobs do so because they feel underappreciated. Your leaders will help your company reduce its attrition rate by addressing these workplace concerns. Taking advantage of skills tests will allow you to better navigate the ongoing worker shortage and skills gap. Ultimately, these benefits will lead to improved staffing stability and higher revenue. Guide Leadership Skills Training Efforts with Pre-Testing Now that we have explored the benefits of using leadership soft skills tests, you are probably eager to incorporate these effective tools into your upskilling program. There are several ways that you can accomplish this. The first and most commonly used approach involves administering skills tests before designing your training program. This approach allows you to accurately assess training needs. You can administer one or more skills tests to your leadership team and determine each member’s deficiencies.

4. After you know which issues you need to address, you can design a training program that aligns with your organizational needs. If you find that your leadership staff needs to level up in more than one area, you can take one of two approaches. One option is to list each identified deficiency and determine which skill set would provide the most value to your organization. Start by addressing the highest priority skill via training and work your way down the list. Alternatively, you could use a divide and conquer approach. This approach is effective if you outsource training to a third-party provider or send your leadership team to seminars/conferences. Using this approach, you could send one manager to emotional intelligence training, another to change management training, and so on. Measure Program Efficacy with Post-Training Skills Testing By administering skills tests before crafting training programs, you will be able to precisely target specific areas of need. But how do you know if your training program was effective? Once again, skills tests offer an ideal solution. By administering skills tests post-training, you can determine how well participants retained the presented information. If a single participant demonstrated minimal improvement while all other team members benefited tremendously, it is safe to assume that your training program was effective. Conversely, if most participants showed little to no improvement during post- training skills testing, you need to modify your program.

5. On their own, pre- or post-training skills tests can improve the efficacy of your program. However, using both of these strategies together will yield optimal results. Leadership Soft Skills Testing Solutions from eSkill As you can see, incorporating skills testing into your leadership training is a relatively easy process. However, you must use expertly designed skills tests. Otherwise, you will not be able to accurately measure the skill levels of your leadership team. With that in mind, you should partner with the premier provider of online skills tests, eSkill. We have hundreds of skills tests, which your team can access via our user-friendly online testing platform. The eSkill assessment library of soft skills tests includes Emotional Intelligence, Change Management, Remote Leadership Skills, and many others. Request an eSkill soft skills test demo today and see why hundreds of companies choose eSkill’s Talent Assessment platform.

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