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Finance Competency Assessment Tool - Online

Helping to Understand the Language of Business

There are two compounding problems associated with raising the financial awareness level in organisations: first, the organisation itself is often not aware of the scale of the lack of financial awareness and where to best concentrate its efforts; second, the individual managers either don’t appreciate their lack of knowledge or are reluctant to admit that they lack such a basic requirement.

FACT has been designed to provide a training needs analysis of your organisation’s financial competence as well as guiding learners through their training process by the use of an Individual Learning Plan.

Understanding the importance of assessment

ILX has developed a methodology which aids the identification of the financial awareness knowledge gaps on a group or individual level. To run a successful training programme it is important to understand the training needs of the audience. Individuals also need to recognise their weaknesses and the areas that they require training.

ILX’s online FACT assessment provides individual learning plans based on the specific responses of each user. The learning plans can then be completed be following ILX’s Finance for Managers e-learning curriculum or by the use of classroom sessions.

Target audience

Junior, middle and senior managers, project managers, sales executives, marketing executives, HR managers, new graduates and other professionals and executives who need to develop their understanding of finance.

What’s included?

• Online assessment – less than 1 hour to complete
• Database of randomly generated questions
• Individual Learning Plan – created on completion of the assessment.
• Group Assessment – created for whole organisation or groups within the organisation.
• Customised Company site – hosted by ILX.

What does it offer? Provides:

• Individuals with an understanding of their level of financial acumen.
• An indication of the current level of financial competence throughout the firm.
• Motivation to begin learning – e-learning or classroom.

The FACT group report can aid the modification of the training content for a forthcoming classroom event by showing the specific areas of need amongst the group.

Directly links to ILX’s Finance for Managers e-learning, which consists of 10 courses covering Financial Fundamentals and Operational Analysis, delivered in a highly interactive format.

FACT outline

The FACT process is typically carried out as per the diagram below:

FACT process

The steps in defining and delivering an assessment for a specific requirement are as follows:

• The specific skills or learning objectives for a group of users are identified.
• The context is agreed in which the assessment will be presented (e.g. As pre-course to the programme to be run by Prof. Terry Campbell) and the conditions under which it will be run (e.g. as an anonymous group exercise).
• A specific assessment is configured to cover these objectives and optional text included at various points in the assessment to explain the reason why a particular objective (or set of objectives) is important to that group. This helps to maintain the commitment of the user to complete the test.
• Users receive an email explaining the context, conditions and completion time requirements and are then free to take the assessment when they wish. A reminder email is sent at an agreed time before the assessment expires to those users that have not taken the assessment.
• A user will normally only be allowed to take an assessment once.
• The assessment consists of blocks of questions, each of which can be prefaced by introductory text. Questions are multiple choice or multi-selection and include a “not sure” option. This reduces false-positives or negatives as a result of guessing and allows the identification of areas that users think they understand but actually do not.
• Real-time reports at a group and individual level are available during and after the assessment. These reports can identify group and individual (where analysis isn’t anonymous) knowledge gaps.
• Learning Plan recommendations, including ILX Group Financial Awareness courses, can then be made for the group or individual.
• ILX Group courses contain Check Your Understanding tests that enable the user to ensure that they have reached a sufficient level of understanding of the course objectives.
• If required, the assessment tools can also provide more detailed post-course assessment to measure the level of understanding of the group. These assessments will normally contain a larger number of questions per objective to ensure that all key learning points have been tested.

Delivery

The Learning Needs Analysis is an application hosted on ILX’s web server. Administrators can access the hosted site to view group reports on the assessments, this information can also be provided by ILX.

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