How Skills Assessments Help Successful Businesses Lead

Learn how an OpenEdge Skills Assessment can make it easier for you to understand what you need to know to realize your organization's ambitions faster.

Digital has become the leading competitive advantage for today’s most successful businesses. No matter what industry you’re in, the companies dominating are the ones that are best equipped to capitalize on the constantly shifting technology landscape.

However, while many enterprises will readily agree that technology plays a critical role in driving innovation and agility, comparatively few take action to fill the growing digital talent gap. With new tools and technology hitting the market every year, new digital skills also need to be learned and acquired.

In fact, one study conducted by Capgemini and LinkedIn found that nearly half of companies felt digital talent gaps within their organization hampered their digital transformation and innovation. Not only are these companies unable to capitalize on opportunities, they also struggle in other ways—namely in turns of establishing a reputation as a leader and in recruiting top-flight talent.

Moreover, this growing skills gap just doesn’t impact the business—it’s anxiety-inducing for employees as well. One in three employees told Capgemini they feared their skillset is already redundant or will be within the next 1-2 years. And in fact, 55% of respondents even said they’d be willing to move to another organization if they feel their current employers are not taking any initiative to help them develop their digital skills.

What this should highlight is the importance of bridging the talent gap. Not only does this help you drive innovation and improve your products and services, it also conveys the boldness of your digital ambitions and conveys your credibility.

Aligning Your Developers’ Skill with Your Organization’s Ambitions

One obvious way you can bridge this talent gap is by investing in education and training services that help your employees learn new skills. That said, you also need to be cognizant of spending your money in the right places—you don’t want to invest in training that your employees feel is pointless or redundant.

COA, the Dutch central body for sheltering asylum seekers, experienced this challenge firsthand. As an incredibly ambitious organization, COA wanted to redefine how it operates through IT and custom-built applications. This would help the organization further empower employees in the field and making the lives of asylum-seekers much easier.

However, COA’s software development manager Michiel Bennebroek knew he would need to rethink how he was using Progress OpenEdge to achieve this vision.

“We were keeping up with the standard development within OpenEdge, which is good for maintenance,” Michiel said. “But to realize our ambition, we needed to do more. We wanted to move to a web services architecture approach that streamlines operations and frees up resources for innovation.”

Michiel knew that a world-class IT infrastructure needed world-class technical expertise and OpenEdge best practices to effectively bring this vision to life. This is when COA decided to explore the OpenEdge Skills Assessment offering from the Progress Services Team.

The OpenEdge Skills Assessment consists of rigorous, in-depth assessments led by top Progress Professional Services consultants. The Progress Professional Services consultants worked with COA’s development team (which consisted of three internal developers and five external programmers) to assess their knowledge and prescribe the training they need to fill any gaps.

“Working with the Professional Services team on the skills assessment was natural and seamless,” Michiel explained. “I work closely with my Progress account management team, so they knew exactly what I was trying to achieve. Progress then did all the work based around my ambitions, they built the assessment, did the interviews and gave me the report, it didn’t cost me any time or effort.”

The targeted training courses were delivered virtually, enabling COA’s Progress developers to quickly and effectively gain the knowledge and expertise they needed—despite the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Michiel reports the feedback from his programmers was great, they viewed the training as helpful and informative.

“I recommend the Skills Assessment to everyone, it’s a must-have if you don’t want to lose focus on achieving your ambitions,” he added.

Fueling Your Success with the OpenEdge Skills Assessment

From the outset, OpenEdge was designed to be a development platform that gives enterprises everything they need to produce high-performance, high-throughput transactional applications at scale. Just as the rest of the technology landscape has evolved, we’ve also been rolling out new features and functionality that enable developers to modernize enterprise OpenEdge applications.

If you lack in-house programs to assess and manage your staff’s OpenEdge skills, it may be difficult to keep up with the continuous updates and improvements in the platform’s capabilities. At the same time, not taking advantage of those changes can put your team at a disadvantage.

That makes grooming and retaining a solid base of OpenEdge developers critical to your development team’s productivity and success. Your staff’s skill level translates directly into higher revenue, lower expenses and less risk.

The OpenEdge Skills Assessment can help you bridge this skills gap with a consistent, measurable means to assess your organization needs and identify focus areas for growth and training. Plus, it’s an incredibly efficient way of getting up to speed, so you can get back to what actually matters: driving more value for your business with your OpenEdge application.

The Skills Assessment boosts productivity by ensuring your developers’ skills are closely aligned with your organization’s goals. You’ll be able to plan and execute appropriate training to better match project needs, and equip your developers with the skills and savvy necessary for gaining a competitive edge in your market niche. Additionally, you’ll maximize your training budget and avoid wasting misplaced time and effort.

Fuel your organization’s success by signing up for a Skill Assessment today.

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