Blog Post

Don’t Recreate the Wheel: Level up your program by leveraging industry knowledge

Identify Your Integrations

With the total number of smart devices expected to double from 21.5 billion in 2021 to an estimated 50 billion by 2025, the ability to gather, analyze, and interpret data is expected to reach an all-time high. For credentialing and licensing organizations, this rapid advancement of technology presents a huge opportunity, but also an immense set of evolving challenges. The importance of defining what data is beneficial for your program, determining what software solutions can fulfill this need, and then working with your exam delivery partner to fully integrate the solution becomes crucial to maintaining an assessment in a competitive market defined by the latest innovations.

 

Whether your organization is looking to build innovations, leverage strategic partnerships, enhance the candidate experience or utilize the latest-and-greatest technology available, start by considering what information would be most beneficial for your organization to capture. For many assessment programs, obsolete data gathering methods, paired with limited integration capabilities, force organizations to adopt time-intensive, hands-on processes, constrained by a rigid, one-size-fits-all approach that fails to adapt to evolving technology. However, with custom configured API integrations, organizations can easily pull information from a wide range of sources, providing virtually limitless capabilities for tailoring communications to candidates, easily managing assessment scheduling and grading, building new programs to accommodate issues of growth and scale, etc. Unfortunately, more often than not, it’s not that seamless.  So, where do you start?

 

Building Your Integration Suite

Once you have established which resources would be most beneficial for your program, it’s time to start thinking about the build. One of the main struggles that many test owners face when beginning the implementation phase are the capabilities of their assessment provider to properly fulfill the integration needs that have been identified. Oftentimes many assessment providers have a limited list of available integrations, making any program customizations difficult. Consider the following options when building your dream program: leveraging pre-built integrations or bringing your own. Each option carries its own benefits and challenges but will shape the way your organization is able to effectively deploy and grow your programs. In determining which direction is the best fit for your assessments, it’s important to know a little bit more about each option first.

 

Option 1: Leverage Commonly Used Integrations

API integrations allow testing organizations to create, schedule, and deliver their assessments, all while ensuring candidates receive clear and timely communications about their eligibility, registrations, preparation materials, scores, and more. These commonly used integrations include scheduling tools, delivery tools, and notification tools, all connected to a candidate database that determines criteria such as eligibility, remote or in-center delivery, notifications for candidates, and more.

Work with your testing partner to determine what specific integrations are available. Some of the most common integrations include:

  • Scheduling APIs: This type of integration enables candidates to select and register for available test sittings
  • Notification APIs: These integrations keep candidates informed of rescheduled or cancelled test sittings
  • Event APIs: Provides specific exam information, such as results, to candidates

    • Eligibility API: Provides the ability to control exam scheduling and deliver services for candidates, with eligibility records containing details such as which exams, dates, and accommodations candidates may receive.

    • Landing Page API: Creates a deep linking interface, redirecting candidates from separate web portals to our scheduling platform, passing in parameters to streamline the scheduling process.

    • Event Notification API: Provides notification about key activities in near real-time, such as scheduled testing, rescheduling testing, or cancelled transactions.

    • Scheduling API: Enables the exchange of candidate booking information, allowing your organization to interface from an external learning or certification portal to a testing network.

    • WebLaunch API: Allows you to utilize your own web-based test delivery driver via remote assessments.

    • OnDemand Testing API: Enables candidates to launch into a locked browser environment for secure remote testing.

    • Event API: Provides detailed exam information, including results, to your candidates.

While these API tools may be commonly integrated into many assessment platforms, it’s also important to ensure each integration works seamlessly with your own systems and existing API integrations, in order to build and deliver fair, valid, and reliable assessments that effectively can be used to maintain the value of your license or credential.

 

Option 2: Bring Your Own Integrations

For many established assessment programs, certain integrations have long been leveraged and need to remain in place – regardless of what delivery partner is being used. Maintaining integrations that are successful is often a considerate strategy that allows for a seamless transition from one platform to another, while ensuring that valuable resources are not squandered in duplicating the functionality of a tool that is already performing as needed. Instead, bringing your own integrations to a new platform is a way to augment existing tools, and to customize a solution that brings together the best of both worlds. With this option, your existing platform is enhanced with additional integrations to safeguard your ongoing success, and secure the growth of your assessment programs.

 

Partnership Integrations

In addition to the integrations listed above, it’s also important to consider the partnerships available that can be utilized to maintain the value of your credential and provide fair, valid, and reliable exams. By leveraging the power of key industry partnerships, your program can verify skills and prove expertise in areas such as performance-based assessments and digital credentials, two key industry developments that are driving innovation, as well as charting the course for how assessments will thrive into the future.

Performance-Based Assessments

In an increasingly competitive hiring market, where talent, skills, and certifications are highly valued commodities, establishing that your candidates can meet the needs of your organization before they are hired, or are recruited to a new work group, can mark the difference between success and failure. Having your candidates demonstrate their proficiency by completing hands-on tasks, such as troubleshooting systems, provisioning databases, or developing an analysis are all ways that performance-based assessments can verify their skillset.

Performance-based assessments are just that: a hands-on test of applied skill and understanding. Unlike traditional testing methods, performance-based assessments are focused on problem solving, and requires candidates to demonstrate their skill, ability, and understanding of a practical problem, contextually based in their field of expertise. Performance-based assessments provide a deeper insight into a candidate’s abilities and ensures that a given candidate can meet the needs of a project.

With TrueAbility, our performance-based assessment partner, we can provide your organization with the hands-on testing necessary to ensure the skillset of your candidates. In TrueAbility’s cloud-based platform, your candidates are placed in a real, computer-based environment to demonstrate the hands-on skill being tested. Paired with our remote proctoring solution, these performance-based assessments can be administered with security, scalability, reliability, and flexibility to meet your organization’s needs.

Digital Credentials

When paired with performance-based assessments, digital credentials, or “badges”, are a way for candidates to verify that they have successfully met the assessment requirements and verified their skill in a given area. For many candidates, digital credentials allow them to quickly identify their skillset to employers and other team members, promoting their own abilities while simultaneously marketing the assessments that landed them in their current role. With Credly, our digital badging partner, your organization can combine the power of performance-based assessments with the verification of the digital credential network, retaining your talented candidates effectively with these credentials, while engaging and retaining new candidates as needed. In this way, digital credentials allow your organization to make data-driven decisions based on trusted skills and abilities.

 

Create Your Integration Dream Team

Finding, recruiting, and assessing an experienced project team can be one of the most challenging tasks for any organization. Let our open API platform and industry partnerships take the heavy lifting out of building your dream team. With our suite of API integrations, your organization can easily verify candidate eligibility, communicate directly with candidates to schedule, cancel, or transfer test registrations, while seamlessly delivering exams, regardless of modality, all in a single platform that can integrate with your existing systems. In addition, our key industry partnerships will keep your organization at the leading edge of innovations in the assessment industry, allowing you to build the foundations for ongoing success and growth that will propel your program into the future. Learn more about how your organization can leverage the industry-leading partnerships offered by Prometric’s platform.