Companies most often would be required to have an online assessment system for their staff. There can be due to various reasons:
1. Compliance and adherence
Employees especially of larger corporations are required by compliance to understand certain important policies and regulations. For example, most companies who are regulated by governing bodies would require a documented proof that their employees have read and understood Data Privacy Act or any other required regulatory compliance. Certain policies require yearly briefing and acknowledgement.
If the company does not have many staff, then the employee can read on a document and then sign a declaration. But how about if your company have hundreds of staff scattered all over the country and globe? It would be very difficult to get them to review and return the signed copies. And even if they do, the reconciliation, document depository and updating would drive whoever that is doing it crazy.
2. To access employees’ knowledge and understanding of certain topics
I use this a lot to test the understanding of my staff. I would set quiz questions in which I made sure all the answers were in the intranet. I would then have the staff take the assessment. As part of their KPI (key performance index), the assessment contributed to a small percentage of their scores.
Initially the quizzes were done using paper and I had to waste a lot of paper to print and time to mark and record down the scores. This improved tremendously after we set up an online quiz system.
3. As a survey tool to gather feedback from staff
Most online quiz system also have the survey function, hence you would be able to gather feedback or survey from your staff. For example, if your company wishes to get employee feedback prior to the launch of a product or change in policy, they can have the survey done, often anonymously.
It is easier to manage compared to having suggestion boxes where someone would need to go into to manually tag and review the results.
Quiz platform to use
The company may engage someone to build the quiz platform from the ground up. Often this quite expensive to do.
What I have used previously was the Joomla Learning Management System (LMS). Joomla itself is free but the LMS system is an advance feature that comes with a yearly renewal fee. The fee is dependent on how many users and comes in multiples as follows: 100, 500, 1000, 5000 users and so on.
Price for a standard package starts from USD199 for 100 users.
Do take note that each user who have taken a quiz would be counted as a user. Let’s say you signed up the package for 100 users. And you have updated and launched quizzes and your staff name list already total to 100 persons. When you reach the user limit, you would not be able to add in any new users without deleting an old user.
Assuming that two of your staff have resigned. But their quiz record is still there. In order for you to add in the user id for the 2 new hirer, you would need to delete the resigned staffs or increase your licence count.
And you need to delete the staff at LMS Quiz> User Management area and not at the user id creation level.
It is actually quite nightmarish if your company have high turnover and very limited licence. Eventually I did persuade the IT guy to increase my licence to 500 users (they have 100, 500, 1000 and so on and nothing in between) so that I have more breathing space.
Overall, the learning curve for Joomla LMS system is not tough. I was able to teach my colleagues on how to upload quizzes in one afternoon using Joomla LMS.
You would probably need to customize the reporting because what you buy off their website may not contain everything that you may need. If you are not familiar with the Joomla LMS, you would probably need to purchase it from a company that specialises in Joomla support and is able to provide training to your staff.
