A progress card on employability
M. DINESH VARMA
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The skill set assessment methodology adopted by MeritTrac is a credible pre-recruitment competency testing methodology accepted by most companies.
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MeritTrac's Adyar office in Chennai can be contacted on 044-42117132.
ASSESSMENT EXPERT: Madan Padaki, co-founder and director, MeritTrac. Photo: K. Gopinathan
Can the employability of a young graduate be quantified? And, once a candidate's strong points and weak spots are identified, can the skill sets be honed to make him industry-ready by the time of the campus interview?
Bangalore-based skills assessment firm MeritTrac has developed a skill set assessment methodology, which is gradually being accepted by more number of companies as a credible pre-recruitment competency testing methodology.
After putting together a verbal ability, analytical reasoning, attention to detail and English communication combo to quantify the employability of young graduates, the company is now negotiating with universities across Tamil Nadu for broadbasing the assessment protocol.
MeritTrac started out with tie-ups with corporates and has already trained a million candidates for over 100 marquee clients, including majors such as Accenture, Intel and Tesco.
The company is now into a phase of striking alliances with academia based on the belief that universities should provide the training input to equip candidates with skill sets that meet industry expectations.
"A proactive industry-academia partnership can help in orienting student skill sets and empower the talent pool to be industry-ready," said Madan Padaki, co-founder and director of the firm.
Ideally, the assessment should be done in the pre-final year so that the university can comprehensively address the candidate's employability shortfalls in the final year, he said. Bharathiar University is the first off-the-block institution in Tamil Nadu to focus on improving employability of its grooms and has signed an MoU for a skill assessment programme.
Another partnership involves the Visvesvaraya Technological University, Karnataka.
The MeritTrac assessment module examines a candidate for communication (written and verbal), analytical and attention to detail skills.
Based on the results of these hour-and-half tests, respondents can be segregated based on skill set differentials and what type of training each group would require.
Though this module is generic, MeritTrac also has an advanced testing methodology for specific criteria matches. The talent pool is accessed by industries with varied profiles and needs and therefore the cut-off scores in the assessment tests would differ.
For instance, a company into high-end production would prefer a higher cut-off score in analytical ability while its low-end counterpart would settle for a mean employability score.
MeritTrac conducts its tests at designated venues as well online. Technology-driven tools have seen the firm use online tests with 14 different question-formats and a voice clip evaluating framework for spoken English skills.
So far, MeritTrac has been catering only to institutional requests but plans to introduce shortly the assessment facility directly to aspirants.
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