New Capabilities Replace Traditional Methods of Benchmarking Talent With a More Efficient Way to Quantify and Develop Team’s Technology Skills

SILICON SLOPES – Pluralsight, the enterprise technology learning platform, today announced a new skills assessment and development suite that replaces traditional methods for assessing and benchmarking technology talent. The new suite, which includes Pluralsight IQ, advanced skills analytics, and advanced channels analytics, is designed to provide technology professionals and leaders with a fast, accurate, and affordable way to measure technology skills. The new suite uses machine learning and modern testing theory to significantly reduce the amount of time and cost usually dedicated to validating technology skills.

Software engineers must re-develop their skills every 12 to 18 months to keep their skills from becoming antiquated, according to Deloitte. This fast pace of technological change makes it difficult for technologists and organizations to remain relevant and competitive. Pluralsight’s new skills assessment and development suite empowers individuals and enterprises to identify where their knowledge lies and to develop a plan for acquiring new or strengthening existing skill sets.

“Pluralsight IQ is the most advanced assessment solution for technical skills in the market, and will be rapidly adopted by IT professionals to validate their technical expertise,” said Cushing Anderson, program vice president at IDC.

"Learning only matters if it turns into skills that can be used on a project, to solve a problem or to build a product," said Aaron Skonnard, co-founder and CEO of Pluralsight. “We developed these new capabilities to give technology professionals and leaders real, quantified and actionable insights for developing the skills required to create world-changing products and solutions."

The new suite includes:

• Pluralsight IQ — provides technology professionals with a free, easy and consistent way to measure and verify their current aptitude in a specific technology. Pluralsight skill assessments are now available to anyone for free. In as little as five minutes and 20 questions, technologists around the world can measure their current skill level and receive a verified Pluralsight IQ, which provides a quantified measure of their current skill proficiency, a timestamp that reflects the relevancy of their score and an easy way for them to showcase it. With plans to grow the collection, Pluralsight currently has 45 skill assessments available across a variety of subjects, including Angular, C#, JavaScript and Python.

• Advanced skills analytics — gives technology leaders unprecedented visibility into individual technologists’ skill sets and current levels of proficiency. With the release of Advanced skills analytics, CIOs, CTOs and technology leaders will gain a deep understanding of the technology skill sets of each member of their team. With insights into all the Pluralsight IQs for their teams, technology leaders will now be equipped to effectively assign technologists to projects where their strengths will create the most impact. Bypassing the manual, time-intensive and expensive process of traditional benchmarking—which results in a static output, CIOs will now have real-time skill data to inform their strategy and ensure their success.

• Advanced channels analytics — allows technology leaders to track the progress of each technologist’s skill development as it relates to strategic objectives. Advanced channels analytics allows technology leaders to see how each member of their team is progressing through the customized learning tracks they created. This information empowers CIOs and CTOs to help their teams acquire the mission-critical skills needed to meet strategic business objectives. It also helps them address skill gaps that may prevent the team from meeting their goals.

“Traditional testing methods don’t work when it comes to measuring tech talent; they’re tedious, costly and quickly become obsolete,” said Nate Walkingshaw, chief experience officer at Pluralsight. “With Pluralsight IQ and our advanced analytics, we’ve built an assessment and development suite that will disrupt resumes, certifications, degrees and endorsements while providing a true understanding of the skills each individual possesses."

More than 40 percent of Fortune 500 companies rely on Pluralsight to enable technology leaders and teams to keep up with the pace of technological change and deliver key innovations on time, on budget, and securely. Through its technology learning platform, Pluralsight makes it possible for technology leaders and their teams to learn directly from world-renowned industry experts on the most important trending topics, including cybersecurity, big data, cloud, and AI.

For more information about Pluralsight, visit plurlasight.com.