British Council goes global with online skill-assessment system

Citation

(2007), "British Council goes global with online skill-assessment system", Industrial and Commercial Training, Vol. 39 No. 7. https://doi.org/10.1108/ict.2007.03739gab.004

British Council goes global with online skill-assessment system

The marketing and communication skills of British Council employees in 109 countries are to be improved through implementation of a new web-based system that analyzes their capabilities and manages skills.

Capability Matrix, from learning-development specialist MyKnowledgeMap, is a customizable online capability and skill-management system that enables users to create, manage and deliver skill-gap assessments for their organizations. A pilot of the system has been in use since last year in British Council offices in north and central Europe, to identify gaps in employees’ marketing and communication skills and help them to perform to the best of their ability.

The pilot was designed to test the implementation of the system in locations where users of different nationalities would need to use the tool without guidance, once it is launched to employees globally.

Sponsored by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the British Council is the UK’s international organization for educational opportunities and cultural relations. It has the remit of building mutually beneficial relationships between people in the UK and other countries. The organization employs people of many nationalities, all over the world. For this reason, the capability-management system needed to be easy to understand and to use.

For the British Council, Capability Matrix has been loaded with competencies based on the professional-marketing standards of the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM), as well as British Council-devised competencies for communication skills.

“As our workforce is geographically dispersed across 220 offices, we needed a system that could help us to see what capacity we had at each level and where it could be deployed,” said Sumathi Jayaraman, who manages the British Council’s corporate-marketing strategy.