Education and demonstration – Occupation
Reexamination Certificate
1999-08-02
2003-02-25
Rovnak, John Edmund (Department: 3714)
Education and demonstration
Occupation
C434S350000, C434S118000, C705S002000, C705S014270
Reexamination Certificate
active
06524109
ABSTRACT:
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to an improved system and method for performing skill set analysis and assessment; and more particularly, relates to a system for allowing skill set assessment to be performed against a comprehensive set of skills using one or more minimum skill sets that may be uniquely tailored for each system user.
2. Description of the Prior Art
In today's competitive marketplace, employers are often seeking ways to evaluate and improve the effectiveness of their workforces. One way to accomplish this evaluation process is by assessing the skills possessed by their employees. This knowledge can be used to make informed employment and staffing decisions. This information may also be used to award compensation adjustments, to grant promotions, or to offer incentives that encourage employees to acquire additional skills. Training programs may be developed to compensate for deficiencies uncovered by the skill assessment process.
Skill assessment may be performed by an employee's management. More often the skill evaluation process will be completed by employees themselves. Each employee may be required to rate his proficiency at performing a set of skills considered important for adequately performing his job. Sometimes this “skill assessment” process may be performed manually. Alternatively, it may be performed with the aid of an automated skill assessment tool running on a data processing system.
Several skill assessment tools are available commercially. These tools allow a set of skills to be entered into a database for use in performing the assessment process. This skills set will generally be defined when the tool is installed for use, and can be modified during the life of the tool. The skill set will usually include all skills related to any employee located anywhere in the entity employing the skills set. For example, an automobile manufacturer employing an automated skill assessment tool may define the skills set to include all skills related to all employees, including those employees in engineering, manufacturing, marketing, managerial, and accounting positions. As a result, this comprehensive skill set may include thousands of unrelated skills ranging from those skills associated with assembly line techniques to skills relating to knowledge on acceptable accounting methods.
By defining a comprehensive skill set such as the one discussed above, any employee anywhere in the company can access the same database to gain a list of skills for which assessment is to be performed. However, the use of this comprehensive skill set may also make using the database cumbersome since only a small number of skills in the database may apply to any given employee. Returning to the previous example, an employee in the engineering development staff has no need to evaluate his proficiency at performing accounting tasks. Likewise, a marketing employee will most likely not be expected to perform skill assessment for skills related to manufacturing jobs.
Because most skills included in a comprehensive skill set definition may not be applicable to any given individual, the evaluation process may be time-consuming. This is especially true since prior art skill assessment tools do not provide a way to filter out the irrelevant skills on an employee or group basis. That is, each employee performing the analysis process must access the skills database and decide from the comprehensive skills list which skills will be evaluated and which will be ignored. Some tools provide this comprehensive skills list as an alphabetized menu of skills. This makes the evaluation process particularly difficult since the skills are not arranged in any sort of a logical manner. The user must therefore review the entire list to select applicable skills for assessment. Other tools display the comprehensive skill set using some logical groupings; for example, all skills associated with an engineering position are presented as a logical skill group. This makes the assessment process easier. However, the employee is still required to view all skill groups in the comprehensive skills set to select the groups thought to be applicable, then select the relevant skills from the selected groups so that assessment may be completed. This selection process makes skiff assessment unnecessarily burdensome and time-consuming.
The selection process associated with prior art skill assessment tools is cumbersome for other reasons. First, prior art tools do not provide a way to communicate, on an employee-by-employee basis, or on a group-by-group basis, those skills that must evaluated. As a result, an employee performing the skill assessment process may have to use an educated guess to decide which of the skills in the database are actually applicable to his job. This introduces errors into the process, since not all employees within a group may perform evaluation on the same set of skills, and the resulting evaluation data may therefore be incomplete. Alternatively, management may have to manually provide a list of skills for a given employee or employee group to use during the assessment process. This manual process is time-consuming, and introduces error into the process. Finally, several levels of management may participate in manually generating the lists of skills that are to be used by individual employees or employee groups during the evaluation process. When this list is received, there may be no indication as to which level of management selected a particular skill for addition to the list. This information may be valuable to an employee in determining the priorities to be placed on acquiring additional skills.
What is needed, therefore, is a skill assessment tool that allows a user to perform the assessment process using only that minimum set of skiffs selected from the comprehensive skiff set that is applicable to the user or to the user's group. This minimum set of skills should be communicated automatically by the tool. The tool should also communicate information related to the manner in which the selected minimum set of skills was defined. For example, the tool should communicate which level of management made the decision to add a particular skill to the minimum set of skiffs for a given employee. Finally, the tool should organize the comprehensive skill set in a manner that allows a user to easily comprehend the types of skills that must be assessed.
OBJECTS
It is a primary object of the current invention to provide an improved system and method for performing skill set assessment;
It is another object of the invention to provide a skill set analysis system that allows one or more minimum skill sets to be defined for use in more efficiently performing skill set assessment against a comprehensive set of skills;
It is still another object of the invention to provide a skill set analysis system that allows minimum skill sets to be defined that are tailored to one or more users of the system;
It is yet another object of the invention to provide a skill set analysis system wherein minimum skill sets are defined in a manner that reflects a corporate or business structure of an entity utilizing the system;
It is still another object of the invention to provide a skill set analysis system for allowing minimum skill sets to be defined in a hierarchical manner;
It is yet another object of the invention to provide a skill set analysis system that allows multiple individuals to contribute to the definition of minimum skill sets;
It is yet another object of the invention to provide a skill set analysis system that provides a comprehensive hierarchically-defined skill set;
It is a further object of the invention to provide a skill set analysis system that includes a user interface for allowing skill set assessment to be initiated at any level of hierarchy within a hierarchically-defined comprehensive skill;
It is yet another object of the invention to provide a skill set analysis system for mapping a hierarchically-defined minimum skill set aga
Bucher Mary A.
Lacy David R.
Lautzenheiser Ted G.
Johnson Charles A.
McMahon Beth L.
Rovnak John Edmund
Sotomayor John
Starr Mark T.
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