ITSA Extra is an online skills appraisal tool which will enable your organisation to analyse and assess the IT skills of its IT employees, using the internationally renowned Skills Framework ‘SFIA’ as its benchmark.

ITSA Extra helps you to identity the skills the employees in your organisation need to deliver its products and services to your clients effectively, efficiently and productively.  Through a self-assessment portal, it will reveal how those employees are currently delivering their role and provide a comparison between their perspective of their role and the needs of your business.  Consequently, this will enable the business to make adjustments where necessary through, for example, training, a more accurate assignment of duties and better targeted recruitment. 

Not only for SFIA skills, why not add your own?

Through ITSA Extra, clients are able to include their own skills codes and descriptors with or without our help, outside the original 121 skills that make up SFIA V8.  This is unique and we believe it is significant as it allows SFIA to be customised to the needs of each client.  ITSA Extra retains the same structure of Levels and Skills whilst allowing a ‘pick and mix’ approach to the Framework. Clients may wish to keep particular SFIA codes, disable others and insert some of their own. This gives clients all the benefits of SFIA, whilst customising it for their particular needs.

Not only that, but have you ever wanted a tool that could incorporate your very own skill codes in it as well? How about behaviours that your organisation prides itself on? Soft skills like leadership? How about skills specific to your organisation, such as internal software you make use of? A process maybe?

Below are some features within the ITSA Extra tool

By mapping your job roles to SFIA, you are able to analyse the skills required for the role from the business’ perspective. This data can then be directly compared against what skills the employees believe are needed for the role.

Role mapping is important, not only because it can show you these discrepancies, but in a number of other ways too. Capability and competency data is captured throughout the business with our tool enabling you to have an incredibly detailed view of how your departments and employees are doing at any time.

One feature within our role builder, unique to ITSA, is how we utilise the principals of the Level of Responsibility outlined in the SFIA Framework. We also divide the skills up further into 3 more categories: “Core”, “Contributing”, and “Awareness”, an important aspect of the analysis, which allows employees and managers to focus on different aspects of career development depending on the skill code’s relevance to the responsibilities of the role.

Once the employees and the managers have completed the verification process, any skill codes that have been frequently added to the individual’s report will be shown in the role builder tool. We call these “Codes for Consideration”. With this information you can discuss whether theses codes, that have frequently been chosen by your employees and verifiers, should be added to the job role itself.

The Employee Report

On completion of the questionnaire, the employee can view their results instantly. They can upload evidence and comment on their results in relation to each SFIA attribute and skill code.

We use a slide bar indicator (0-100%) for the employee to indicate how competent they feel they are against the attributes and code descriptors within their reports.

A traffic light system compares the employee’s outcomes using the Level of Responsibility for reference, revealing how close each attribute and skill code is to their chosen level. Each change is automatically saved making the report ready for review in real-time.

The Green Report

Sometimes our clients would like to get straight to the point without employees completing a self-assessment questionnaire.

ITSA allows you to bypass the questionnaire and have the employee validate their skills according to the job role that has been mapped in the ITSA Job Role Builder. Assigning the mapped role to the employee gives them access to add evidence, make adjustments to the competency slide bars, and, if necessary, edit the report to suit them. When they have completed their changes the line manager can then give the final approval and agree the report during a development review, all without sitting the assessment.

Use of the Green Report grants a full set of data reports that would normally arise from a completed questionnaire but with the focus on the verification process and discussions between the employees and their line managers instead.

Managers and Verifiers

ITSA gives you, the client, control of the verification process between managers (or chosen 3^rd parties) and employees within the reporting tool in real-time and is predominantly used in businesses for development purposes.

We have built ITSA to slot into existing business development review processes. Within ITSA Verifiers can review any uploaded evidence, add comments, and agree or adjust the results, according to the employee’s submissions.

As a development tool ITSA is ideal for employees and managers to come together, using a common language platform such as SFIA, to discuss strengths and weaknesses against the SFIA skills profile allocated to their role. We are the only assessment product that allows for post-assessment verification to be handled within the real-time product, allowing for instant management of skills within your business using a single unified tool.

Career Pathways

When you have the skills required for each role mapped users of ITSA can view other roles across the organisation and see how close, in percentage terms, they fit to that role.

Another use of this feature is for human capital management. As you are able to see all of the skills across the organisation, you are able to best place employees for specific project, and see where the most appropriately skilled employees are quickly and easily. This also aids in the recruitment process by more accurately recognising skills gaps in the business so you know what to focus on during recruitment drives.

Development Room

The employees and managers can keep track of individual development data with the Development Room; using it as a repository for information to be accessed and shared when necessary.  

The Development Room includes information such as: a ‘Course Log’, in which employees can list developmental courses past or present that they have been on; a ‘Qualification Log’, containing uploaded evidence such as certificates; and ‘Previous Knowledge’, relating to what the employee might have done in past roles which could be useful for the business to know.

The Knowledge Bank

This is an additional assessment tool within ITSA which involves an objective test as opposed to the subjective self-assessment process. You can create your own assessments which focus on specific skills, such as technical or brand knowledge, involving a set of questions relevant to the skills performed in each role.  The data is captured in a similar way to the ITSA self-assessment questionnaire results.

Administration

We have a clear hierarchical structure allowing departmental allocation of access with managers only able to view those employees for which they have responsibility.  There is full administrative control over candidate registrations, the use of bulk uploads or manual ones, customisation of invitation emails, and many other elements. This all helps to give you complete control over the system. You may also appoint as many administrators as you wish to manage the ITSA program effectively.  

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