The Software Testers Academy is a pilot training programme developed by South Eastern Regional College (SERC), in conjunction with the Department of Employment and Learning (DEL) and InvestNI. This programme aims to provide graduates in Northern Ireland with the skills and experience required to respond to opportunities opening up in software testing and quality assurance (QA) within the local IT industry.
The programme was designed by a host of Northern Ireland’s top IT companies and supported by DEL and InvestNI; it consists of an 8 week training programme held at SERC (Lisburn), followed by a company placement and finishing with the successful participants gaining an industry recognised qualification. The programme was open to HND or degree graduates of any age and from any discipline, and as such, received an unanticipated number of applicants.
We had almost 800 candidates apply, all with HND’s or degrees, how do we decide if they would have the skills necessary to be a Software Tester? That’s where MindMill comes in…
MindMill’s psychometric assessment software was used to screen 767 applicants down to 30 candidates who would go to interview and finally be whittled down further to 20 successful participants. MindMill’s psychometric assessments are designed to measure a candidates Capacity for Processing Information (CPI), or in other words, their ability to learn the new skills required within a relatively short period of time. We worked with DEL and SERC to select an assessment package which would gauge a candidate’s natural ability in technical-based fields. The MindMill system measures personality and cognitive abilities, based on natural aptitude as opposed to learned curriculum. The chosen cognitive assessments measured error detection, numeracy, reasoning ability, orientation and working memory; all vital skills for a successful software tester. Although ability is essential, MindMill recognise that each company’s culture is very different, and as such, so are the types of employees. We met with the IT companies in the programme to develop a profile of the ideal candidate for each individual company, enabling the successful participants to be placed within a company suitable to their personality, therefore creating the best possible placement experience for both the IT company and the Academy participant.
The MindMill assessment was emailed to all candidates who were given 2 weeks to complete; after the deadline had passed there were 550 candidates who had completed the assessments. These candidates were ranked by CPI, and found that there were more than enough candidates who were suitable on test scores alone. However, as the MindMill system also assesses personality and we had already discussed ideal profiles with the participating companies, we were able to cut this down to 30 candidates for interview by DEL.
In relation to this Pilot , the MindMill system has successfully been used to screen a large number of applicants in a recruitment situation; saving the Software Tester’s Academy both time and money.
Traditionally, the approach would have been to hire a hall, have all candidates attend and complete a paper-based psychometric assessment, which would then have to be hand-scored and ranked before being manually entered into a spreadsheet to allow contact with all participants via phone or mail-merge. As you can imagine, this is very time consuming and costly, in terms of administration costs, venue rental and paper usage. MindMill are happy to help by eliminating these costs with our dynamic, fully online assessment system.
We wish all the best to the successful participants in the Software Tester’s Academy and look forward to working in conjunction with DEL, SERC, InvestNI and all the participating local IT companies in the near future.