The CareerBooster Story
Today, many companies are faced with the challenge of migrating to and/or implementing new technologies to adapt to the changing business needs. As they plan for these initiatives, many questions may arise, like “Do we have the staff to support the initiative?" or "Will we keep the implementation of those strategies in-house or outsource?" or "How will we train our employees to support and utilize the investments that we have made?”

To plan and position these initiatives effectively, oganizations need to assess the skill sets of their employees, map out their desired future skill base, identify their gaps, prioritize who and what skill knowledge to increase and finally, prove a return on their investment. 

In 1998, the owners of New Horizons of Minnesota decided to invest in the creation of a tool that would help organizations make those decisions. In 2000, SMART (Skills Measurement Assessment Resource Tool) was launched. This browser-based tool allows organizations to map job roles to technologies. Users are assessed on a wide variety of technologies and skill gaps are then recognized. Specific educational solutions are produced with recommendations which align the right education for the right needs. 

However, we soon realized that many people take a personal interest in developing their own skill sets too, so we created CareerBooster. CareerBooster is a tool that allows you to assess your skill level based on numerous technologies and other on-demand skills. It helps determine skills gaps and then maps an educational solution to close those gaps. 

As an education provider, New Horizons of Minnesota  not only uses the tool for the benefit of our students, we also use it internally for two audiences: our instructors and our account executives. Our instructors can view information and skill levels of students prior to the day of their class. From the data collected, they’re able to customize their teaching to the needs of the students, promoting an added degree of customer service and higher than normal evaluations. Our account executives use CareerBooster as a value added approach to validate training recommendations, track when students have taken classes and help improve our class utilization. All of these factors have helped with our overall success as an organization, which, from a customer service standpoint, help increase our quality as measured by Metrics That Matter (post-class evaluations).

From our center alone, we have over 680 CareerBooster accounts created each month from all over the world.  About 70% of these assessments are completed by students already registered for a class. The other 30% represent students who want to improve their current educational skill set.   

Today,  New Horizons of Minnesota supports both SMART and CareerBooster and use them as a part of our overall business plan.

.