Assessing Developer Skills

[techgnome]

I've been tasked with developing a training program for our new developers as they are hired. Part of that task will be to assess their skills, then tailor the actual training to beef up the spots where they are weakest. I will also be assessing the skill set of our existing developers and setting up training for them as well.

The way I see it, there are four areas that need to be looked at:
1) VB ... be it .NET or Classic (we're in a transition phase currently)
2) SQL ... SQL Server to be exact...
3) Crystal Reports ... 'nuff said
4) Standards and practices ... this is our internal processes, how we do certain things. I fully expect new hires to "fail" this segment, but they should be proficient in them (to some degree) by the end of training.... so it still needs to be assessed at somepoint.

Does anyone's organization do assessments like this? If so how? Does anyone have any clues as to how I might go about setting this up? Resourses, ideas, ect?

-tg

[mendhak]

That's a tough one. I don't really think organizations across any geographic or financial span have any standardized tests that work when it comes to skill assessment. It's more up to the interviewer.

Considering that they're hired, it's again similar to an interview process. Find a whole bunch of interview questions on the net, give it to them on the test and tell them that this is purely to assess their knowledge of the skillsets, so that they can write "Dunno" in front of questions they have no clue about.

IMEO, a second round right after that, in which you talk to them. Just talk to them about each of the areas, in a more generalized way. What projects they've worked on, what they did in the project, what they understood from the projects, so that you can also get an idea of their learning pace/skills as well, since that factors quite importantly with any bunch of n00bs. It can also be used to get to find out what they know of standards and practices.