Welcome to this Questionmark podcast. Questionmark podcasts bring you news, ideas, and advice about assessments and learning.

Joan Phaup, Questionmark: This is Joan Phaup from Questionmark. Today I’m taking with Mark Julius, Training Technology Consultant at Sanlam Personal Finance in South Africa. Hi Mark, welcome.

Mark Julius, Sanlam Personal Finance: Hi Joan. Thank you.

Joan: I wondered if we could start by having you tell us about your organization and your job role.

Mark: Sanlam is a worldwide company, and we do business in the United Kingdom, India, Australia, Namibia, and some African countries like Botswana, Kenya, Zambia, and Ghana. And some of (?0:42) anymore, but we’re a financial services provider, and we offer the following: investments, insurance, home loans, group benefits. My job role basically within the company is to implement and support all training technologies used within the Sanlam group, of which Questionmark Perception is one.

Joan: And could you tell us how Sanlam is using online assessments?

Mark: Well, Sanlam started out using Questionmark Perception from as early as 1999. The challenge at that time was to get rid of all paper-based assessments within our company, and also to help our facilitators cut down on spending time grading assessments. So initially the tool was used to test the product knowledge of our brokers and advisers, and upon successful completion of these assessments, they were accredited with these products. Legislation requires that brokers and advisers cannot write business unless they have the necessary qualifications to do so. So Questionmark Perception is used to ensure that they become qualified and competent. Later on, the tool was extended for compliance purposes as well. You know, as a financial services company, Sanlam is continuously challenged to comply to the increasing regulatory requirements by civil authorities. Various laws exist to which the Sanlam much comply, amongst others, (?2:22) Financial Intelligence Centre Act. That is an act to combat money laundering. There is also your Financial Advisory Act, and the aims, this law aims to regulate the giving of advice and the rendering of intermediary services to clients. And then a recent addition to it was the National Credit Act, which applies to credit agreements with all consumers. So with all these acts, we need to prove to the federal authorities that we are compliant, and that it is where Questionmark Perception comes in. Also, because of the previous dispensation, where people were discriminated against then based on the color of their skin, legislation now requires to address the backlog of the past, and companies therefore have to prove how they support transformation by addressing critical skills (?3:26) in previously disadvantaged communities. And because of this, Sanlam has to report to government on how they invested in developing these critical skills for (?3:37)s on the following criteria: based on race and gender and disability. And the other challenge we had was the fact that we had to give detailed reports to government to prove our compliance. And because of this, we integrated two technologies. FIP(?3:58) human resources system, and our learning management system with Questionmark Perception. And because of this integration, employee records are automatically updated, and the necessary detailed reports can be drawn from the system.

Joan: I’d like to know what your strategies are for making your tests approximate the situations your employees encounter on the job.

Mark: Okay. So many of our facilitation and training takes place on systems that we’ve developed within Sanlam, enough(?4:27). And one of our greatest clients is our client contact center. And most of the time, our assessments contain graphics or screenshots of the assessments testing knowledge, but we also use Captivate simulations in our assessments to test skills. And the reason that (?4:46) was assessing the number accuracy and speed of data capture in our new business environment using Questionmark Perception and Captivate. And although the questions were both in Captivate and then were folded into Perception, and basically the assessment consists of numbers and email addresses, addresses of people’s— names of places and names of people, and consisting of various numbers of (?5:13), and these were then flashed on the screen. And the participants are to accurately recall what they have seen on the screen. And using their keyboard, they have to type up to 16 digits of numbers. And the reason for that was, last year we have seen the amount of calls under scores, number, accuracy, and speed, and business wanted to know know if they’re still on par. So instead of, for us as a, to save money, instead of sending them a game to do the course, so we’ve actually developed something similar to what they’ve done in the course, in the number and accuracy speed course, and we’ve actually used Questionmark Perception for that. We are also currently investigating incorporating other (?6:06) perform simulations into Questionmark Perception, and this is a technology which is a key(?6:14) developed. And we’ve recently rolled this out. It was in our company. So we are seriously looking at how we can make other (?6:25) Perform integrate with Questionmark Perception.

Joan: That’s great. Now I’d like to talk a little bit about the fact that you have all these offices all over different countries. And I want to know how you manage test authoring when you have people spread around so many different places.

Mark: Well, what we have is, within each business unit within the company, we have what we call a Questionmark Perception champion. And basically, that person is responsible for the authoring of the assessments and surveys within the business unit. That person is also responsible for the scheduling, you know, and the uploading of participants to our system. Where I come in, I’m responsible for the governance and the standards for perception. I’m also responsible for the documentation and training of Perception according to the Sanlam standards. And then we have regular communications regarding issues, new developments, and upgrades. And all our users belong to the Questionmark Perception community, and we always appreciate the technical tips sent by Sarah Elkins.

Joan: Great. Now as far as test authoring is concerned, do the people in the different offices do the authoring, or does the authoring take place centrally?

Mark: Well, authoring takes place, there is no (?7:52), according to the business requirements. Initially, when we started out using Perception, everything was done centrally, but you know it became too much of a burden in the things that we, I and my colleague didn’t always have the capacity to assist our users or clients in their various business units. And for that reason, we decided that we will train people within the business unit as champions taking responsibility for the business unit as far as Questionmark Perception is concerned.

Joan: Okay, so that’s fine. I just wanted to clarify. So those champions are also authoring, to some extent.

Mark: Yes, they are also authors as well.

Joan: And what about managing the various different kinds of assessments that happen within each business unit?

Mark: Well, it all depends. I’m always there to assist them and to consult with them. And they regularly, when they get stuck with a type of assessment, if they’re unsure what type of assessment should be used, then we would always need, I would look at the questions and I will give them guidance as far as to what type of assessment it should be. May I just also mention that we also use Perception to evaluate our employees on a 360 competency-based assessment. And currently, we, our business needs to report again half-yearly as far as competencies of our employees, whether that has been met. So currently I am very busy setting up various surveys for these clients to evaluate the people or the employees within Sanlam on a 360 degree.

Joan: You’re a busy person! It sounds like you’re keeping nice and busy. You’re dealing with test-takers in different countries, and I imagine that must be quite challenging. Could you talk a little bit about your greatest delivery challenges and how you address them?

Mark: Well, I think within Africa, bandwidth is always a challenge, irrespective of the robust server that we have. And because of that, we limit the use of graphics and Captivate type of questions, because bandwidth challenges create slow response. And we also need to take into account the computer literacy of our end users, and therefore we design assessments accordingly. And change management is always high on the agenda, especially if it’s a new group of participants. And if it is new participants, we always schedule what we call a dummy assessment. That’s so that they can get used to the type of questions and how to answer them.

Joan: Could you finish by talking about how you use your test results, and how your testing program helps Sanlam address its business needs?

Mark: Well, Sanlam’s main strategy is to be the leader in wealth creation. And not only the leader in wealth creation, but we also would like to be the employer of choice. And part of that strategy is to create a high performance culture within the company. Now a training technology such as Questionmark Perception supports, actually, that strategy, simply because it is cost effective. It allows fast delivery of assessments. And the process of using Perception allows the assessments to be fair and reliable. We can give extensive reports and analyze the results when surveys were done, especially in our marketing department. There is also consistency in the assessments and delivery process. It also allows us to adhere to the civil regulatory requirements. It is compatible with other systems, for example our HR SIP Learning Management System, and it also fits into our architecture from an IT perspective. And in conclusion, I can say that we will always follow the route where we use Questionmark Perception as an assessment technology, simply because it has proved itself to be reliable and cost effective. And it fit very nicely into our training blended learning strategy.

Joan: Mark, thank you so much. It was really interesting talking to you today, and I appreciate your taking the time out to talk to us.

Mark: Thank you, Joan.