NETg’s Award Winning Precision Skilling Links Learning with Corporate Strategy

November 5, 2001

Today at the TechLearn 2001 conference NETg launched Precision Skilling™, an innovative technology that allows learning to be linked to corporate strategy. NETg’s Precision Skilling automates, enterprise-wide, the linking of business-critical skills with the best learning materials to close skills gaps and support business goals. Most importantly it accomplishes this 90 percent faster than traditional manual methods and because of its natural language algorithm, Precision Skilling’s matches are vastly more accurate than skills management systems. The process of linking learning materials to skills has traditionally required months and dedicated permanent staff. With NETg’s Precision Skilling, this process can now be accomplished in just hours or even minutes.

“If an organization does not associate learning with required employee skills, it will not achieve its business goals”, said Dr. Jim L’Allier, NETg’s Chief Learning Officer. “Unfortunately, solutions currently offered are either impractical or ineffective. Precision Skilling changes the landscape, now empowering companies to perform this logical business planning quickly and effectively.”

NETg’s Precision Skilling has already proven its value for Northwest Airlines, who needed to associate 3,300 skills to the best learning materials out of 1,800 options. Mathematically, this results in a potential 6 million possible matches to evaluate. For reasons of cost and time, manually linking training to skills was no longer a viable option. Precision Skilling provided the linking of most appropriate learning to specified skills in less than an hour and NWA employees are now able to receive more effective training faster enterprise-wide.

“To assure effective training, course materials must be relevant to specific employees,” said Cushing Anderson, senior analyst for International Data Corp. “NETg’s Precision Skilling has the potential to alter the way companies design their corporate learning programs by efficiently identifying relevant training opportunities for individual job roles. There is currently no other product that can evaluate and assign training to skills as efficiently and as effectively as Precision Skilling.”

Precision Skilling is the next-generation of skills management systems, dramatically advancing the process to accommodate the entire enterprise much faster than traditional manual methods. First-generation solutions were essentially search engines delivered with pre-defined skills databases and learning descriptions. Search engines, however, do not adequately ensure accuracy of the match, and often deliver inappropriate results. Further, systems that rely exclusively on vendor-designed skills and learning databases limits the ability of the organization to define unique skills or include a sufficient range of learning material options. NETg’s Precision Skilling elevates skills management to the process of automated skills mapping and provides highly accurate associations of learning materials to skills while working with virtually any set of skill descriptions and learning material options.

In advance review, NETg’s Precision Skilling has earned praise from industry experts. Online Learning magazine and brandonhall.com honored Precision Skilling in October 2001 with the Excellence in e-Learning Award for Innovative Technology.

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