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For some company, employees are expected to pass company-defined competency exams in orders to perform those jobs. For example, new project managers need to be certified within 3 years in order to continue in the project management job.

1. This is a company-defined competency (or certification). An outside group tell not be shutting your business down if some of your people fail the certification exam.
2. You can continue to have employees performing the job even before they are certified. And you can choose to have them con¬tinue to perform the job even. if they fail the exam. (Although you probably don’t want them doing it for long if they continue failing the exam).
3. You are not bound to meet a deadline set by an outside regula¬tory organization-for example, you don’t have a yearly recerti¬fication that you must meet. You can be more flexible about the time limits within which all the training and exams must be completed.

At stake is your ability to get high performance from your employ¬ees in certain jobs - where passing the competency exam is the mark of a certain skill level. You expect your business to run more productively when these key jobs are staffed to a predefined skill level.

The solution approach here, is centered on a learning management system (LMS). You need the LMS to manage the overall training program. You could never keep track of all the employees and how far they’ve progressed if you had to do it manually.

The first step is to develop a collection of training courses that lead your employees to the expected skill level. Depending on the type of competency being taught, the courses might be completely self-directed online, or you might include some courses with col¬laboration and instructors. In some cases (depending on the sub¬ject matter), you might even need to have a face-to-face session in addition to the online courses. We call this “blending” the instruction.

Then, you need the exams that the employees will have to pass.

The learning management system will present the “roadmap” of courses that each employee on a path to a competency exam needs to complete to prep for certification. The LMS will track which courses the employee has taken and which are still to be taken.

Some LMS can automatically schedule students for classes and can even automatically prompt the student with an e-mail  when he’s falling behind. And the learning management system will also deliver the quizzes and tests that move the employee along the compe¬tency’ roadmap, as well as delivering the final competency exam online,

The LMS will also provide reports to company management about where the various employees are in their competency road map, and it will report on who passed the final exams. The LMS an sometimes manage “testing out” of certain courses. If an employee has previous job experi¬ence, it would be useful to let the employee “test out” of taking the class.

The key advantage you have in this case study is motivated students. When the training is clearly connected to keeping a job, your training program has a good chance of overall success.