Integrated Performance Assessment: Linking Individual Development to Industry Standards

Linking individual development to industry standards is not an easy task, but it is a task worth its weight in gold once an individual understands how to employ objective methods to the performance assessment process.

Learning to self-regulate your performance through personal and professional development requires making a conscious and deliberate effort to self reflect through serious introspection. Feedback may come through formal or informal methods. Self reflection is by nature a personal and innate process that each person does independently through his or her own introspection and perception. On the other hand, self reflection can also be educed through external perceptions. What others think and believe is an external method used to judge how well we measure up to known or unknown expectations. Both internal and external performance measures are subjective techniques we use to judge our knowledge, skills, and capabilities.

Competency standards can be used to develop tools that will enable accurate and objective self reflection. The ISD Performance Inventory is a measurement tool that instructional designers and developers, regardless of their skill level, expertise, and areas of focus can use to judge how well they measure up to competency standards. It is imperative that we learn to employ methods that will enable us to continuously make improvements as we grow, innovate and lead. The Integrated Performance Assessment: Linking Individual Development to Industry Standards presentation was presented at the 2007 International AECT Conference. If you missed the presentation you can preview it below.

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A Quest for Instructional Design Competencies, Methods, and Tools

In today’s fast-paced, transient, global economy, instructional technology (IT) professionals have no way to manage and track performance to industry competency standards. An IT professional’s work life is constantly changing and new methods, tools, and technologies have an immediate impact on individual development. To effectively perform the functions of the instructional designer and developer roles, in any work environment, practitioners need the ability to measure and monitor their performance on industry defined competency standards. This would enable them to assess their strengths and weaknesses on core competency standards. IT professionals “have a responsibility to keep their skills current” (Rothwell & Kazanas, 2004, p. 386). Richey, Fields, Foxon, Roberts, Spannaus, and Spector (2001), claimed updating and improving one’s knowledge, skills, and abilities is an important and essential competency.

With the right measurement methods and tools professionals would be empowered to measure, score, and monitor their own performance on existing competency standards. This would also enable them to make effective decisions about their professional development and career planning activities. Similarly, employers and educational organizations would also be able to measure and monitor individual performance for recruitment, selection, placement, succession planning, training, development, and career counseling.

A literature review was conducted to identify what competencies, methods, and tools are extant in the field to enable effective performance assessment of IT professionals. The author will discuss the research problem that led to the literature search, identify prior research studies, review the literature, and explain the solution. This literature review was conducted as apart of the author’s dissertation research. In-depth coverage of the literature review and instrument development and validation results can be found in the dissertation. To learn more about the literature review findings read the article presented at the 2007 AECT Conference