WheeboxETS launches ‘Global Employability Test’ to assess career readiness, targets Indian institutes

In addition, Wheebox plans to provide a detailed report to the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) showcasing participation and performance data of engineering colleges.

Online assessment platform Wheebox ETS, a subsidiary of US-headquartered educational testing and assessment organisation ETS, launched a Global Employability Test (GET) to assess the employability skills of students on July 1.

Designed to evaluate cognitive abilities, communication skills, technical knowledge, and soft skills through an online multiple-choice format covering various industry-relevant topics, the test aims to provide insights into students' workforce readiness enabling institutions to identify areas needing improvement.

The 90-minute-testing process will involve 89 questions designed to assess four key areas within the Wheebox ETS’ ‘Unified Competency Framework’. Firstly, communication skills are evaluated through speaking, listening, and writing tasks, focusing on coherence and subject relevance. Aptitude is tested to gauge numerical and logical thinking abilities. Behavioural aspects are assessed regarding teamwork, adaptability, and learning agility. Finally, domain knowledge related to specific industries is examined.

“The test is adaptive, meaning question difficulty adjusts based on previous answers to evaluate candidate skills efficiently. A score above 60 percent indicates readiness for most employability tests in India, with questions set at a standard akin to 10th-grade level comprehension,” Nirmal Singh, CEO of Wheebox, told Moneycontrol in an interview.

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To be sure, candidates who score above 60 percent on the test receive a percentile rank, which indicates their standing relative to others who have taken the test. This percentile rank is dynamic in a continuum test, meaning it can change over time as more people take it.

For example, scoring at the 99th percentile means the candidate has performed better than 99 percent of test-takers on that day, but this rank may fluctuate as more data is gathered over time.

How does the GET score help students?

Wheebox ETS partners with professional networking platform LinkedIn to offer certifications to 2,000 students annually. These certifications can be showcased on CVs and LinkedIn profiles, enhancing career prospects, according to Singh.

“We track these students over several years to analyse their career progression and job outcomes. The aim is to establish a correlation between performance in our tests and professional success over time,” he added.

In a nutshell, scoring well on the tests correlates with better job opportunities. Singh claims many prominent companies like Tata Motors, Maruti, Accenture, Infosys, and others use Wheebox assessments in their hiring processes.

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Wheebox also plans to provide detailed reports to the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) showcasing participation and performance data of engineering colleges. These reports highlight each batch's strengths and areas needing improvement among their students.

“Our goal is to support colleges in enhancing their students' employability. We advise them with early diagnostics, enabling proactive measures to improve student readiness for future employability tests,” Singh said, anticipating participation from at least 3,000 institutes for GET.