A leader in the industry, the client strives to deliver network experiences that transform how people connect, work, and live. Driven by innovation and creativity, the client has built strong expertise across diverse industries—from education to healthcare to secure banking. With a wide variety of products, custom solutions, and services, the organization is a Fortune 500 company headquartered in Sunnyvale, California.

With a growing customer base, the client organization is committed to supporting its products with training. The training strategy must meet the differing needs of individual learners and teams across the globe. The Client wanted to assess organizational readiness to better understand the training needs for technologies deployed in their network and subsequently develop a plan to fill gaps. Additionally, they wanted to capture the skills transformation necessary to align with future investments and changes in their network.

However, their challenges were manifold: 

• They are constantly under pressure to track and determine which training is best suited for their employees and partners. A global network adds to their woes. 
• Employees are increasingly required to become subject matter experts on new and updated topics, given the constantly evolving technological landscape. Certification and courses had to be consistent in meeting these requirements. 
• The existing manual process of preparing and presenting survey questionnaires to the target audience was tedious. Further, the manual exercise of result tabulation to prepare a recommendation report took days to complete. 
• Reports generated could not be customized, which led to inaccurate analysis.

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ELB Learning was commissioned to build a Knowledge Survey Analysis (KSA) tool to meet their specific requirements. The newly designed KSA tool helps assess a target audience’s proficiency levels in various technologies.

The KSA tool was developed as a single interface to create, distribute, and manage surveys, as well as recommend appropriate training, courses, and certifications to learners at different levels. The tool will be able to generate individual and consolidated reports with the current knowledge level and recommended levels for learners. The reports can either be viewed online or downloaded for further analysis. The KSA tool was deployed on the client’s cloud infrastructure for easy access and provided a reliable delivery mechanism. 

The custom development team at ELB Learning developed the KSA tool with a backend mechanism to store tracks of questions and answers, corresponding to the various streams of training, as offered by the client. Key features include: 

• Each track accommodates three levels - Introductory, Intermediate, and Advanced. 
• The Tool consists of three modules: the Admin Module, which creates and manages surveys; the User Module, which collects responses from the learner; and the Report Module, which generates a consolidated report in MS Word format.
• The survey administrator selects one or more tracks and generates a new survey for each customer based on their business case. This generates a unique link for each survey. 
• Each unique link is tied to the recipient client organization and a Sales Account Manager. 
• The KSA tool consolidates the responses and generates a group report (in Microsoft Word format) for the client organization. 
• The KSA tool is flexible and accepts changes to questions and tracks. The Client was responsible for creating/modifying questions and content for all training tracks. 

The KSA tool is unique in that it does not require integration with any external survey tools and instead has built-in survey capabilities. The tool helps generate a list of training courses based on deficiencies in the assessment results and assigns suitable training to help upskill/cross skill. This type of training recommendation or certification is not possible with typical survey tools. 

The KSA dashboard for the admin allows users to create surveys and search by name, which is further enhanced with its dropdown filter feature. When there is a significant volume of data, these filters allow the admins to retrieve the specific assessment from the tool. Creating surveys based on track and region ensures greater accuracy.

The actionable insights are accurate, and reports can be personalized to handle dynamic business needs. Perhaps the most attractive USP is its ability to configure surveys and generate recommendations in a fraction of the time compared to the previous manual system.

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Using the tool, the client could identify and recommend the training required every year to keep up with the trends. The KSA tool empowered the client to dynamically tailor survey questionnaires for their target audience. The client uses the data to plan for their team’s ongoing skill development and accelerate its sales process and approach to customers.

• 96% of stakeholders perceived a positive effect with the ability to track learner progress. 
• 90% reduction in the time taken to create surveys and generate reports.  
• An accelerated go-to-market strategy, as the survey can be instantly updated with newer products.
• 40% reduction in the number of questions. 
• The tool has enabled learners to focus on areas where they require more training.

Perhaps the most noteworthy impact is that the survey has been instrumental in selling the client’s Complete Training Key. This comes with one ILT (Instructor-led Training) and unlimited OnDemand training. 100% of the companies that took the survey bought training compared to when they did not take the survey. This has increased the OnDemand offerings over the last few years, including intermediate- and advanced-level training.

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