December 2011 Archives Cheryl Wild

Four Ways to Go Wild

You and I are a minority. We like testing. We believe testing can provide benefit to individuals and to society. Certification programs are especially helpful to individuals, employers, and the public. As clients, participants in my workshops, and readers of my publications, you know that my passion is to help certification organizations provide services that delight their customers.

Many of the readers of my e-zine and blog ask me specific questions to help them delight their certification customers and clients. There are four ways to experience my thinking and the first way is FREE.

The other three ways are Workshop Enrollment and/or Buy my Books, Limited Engagement and Wild’s Signature Engagement. FREE is a first, easy, and no-excuses way to Go Wild. I invite you to start planning to participate in these free services as part of your New Year’s planning. Build them into your game plan for 2012.

Each year I make many efforts to present at professional meetings. I get no compensation for the preparation, the presenting, the travel costs so, that makes it one of my FREE services for you. In February, I will be at the Association of Test Publishers meeting in Palm Springs California. I’ll be presenting in a session called Building Quality Communications to improve Stakeholder Relations, on February 27^th with Dania Eter(National Council of State Boards of Nursing, Inc.), Georgia Patrick (The Communicators, Inc.) and Cheryl Wild (Wild & Associates, Inc.).

Another free feature this year is the first annual Benchmarking Day for Improving Certification on March 28, 2012.This event was specifically requested by participants in my Improving the Quality of Your Certification Program: A Learning and Planning Experience and by folks in my ICE workshop. Only clients, past workshop participants, and e-zine subscribers are invited to this free workshop.

There’s a very good reason why the Free Benchmarking Experience is designed for people who know me, read my books, and invite me into their organization to work with them. Benchmarking is not just sharing what we do. Effective benchmarking requires identifying and sharing best practices – after all the purpose of benchmarking is to make major improvements or to design services to be best practice from the beginning. Benchmarking requires:

A willingness to admit that you can learn from others
A desire to achieve best practice rather than an attitude of doing enough to get by
A willingness to share nonproprietary information even if it means discovering that your processes aren’t the best
An understanding that to identify best practice we need to develop metrics and measure ourselves

Those of you who have had experience with me are among the best certification organizations in the industry and have exhibited anopenness to improvement. Benchmarking is one of the highest forms of equal sharing of very precious information and we don’t do that with strangers. This only works in a trusted environment and the one point of trust everyone in the room has is me, as their consultant, as their experienced guide.

What are some of my other free services? If you are reading this you know about my blog. You may also sigh up for my e-zine at http://www.wildandassociates.com/

If you have specific questions that you would like answered in the blog or ezine, write me at cheryl@wildandassociates.com or call me at 732-774-5188. If you are interested in more than the free venues offer, consider one of the other ways to get involved:

Workshop and Books: Call me (732-774-5188) to discuss your participation in the two-day workshop just prior to the free benchmarking day. Buy my book.
Limited Engagement: Call me to discuss issues and concerns you are struggling with that could be addressed in a limited consulting engagement. I frequently conduct internal audits against ISO/IEC 17024 standards and help organizations benchmark specific processes or procedures
Wild’s Signature Engagement: Call me to discuss operation issues that need expertise and process improvements or new certification development. These often include staff training so that you can move this work in house in the future.

Building Quality Communications to Improve Stakeholder Relationships!

As a consultant in quality, I have the privilege of talking to lots of testing professionals about their problems and I’m always surprised how often the problem really boils down to communication. Reliability, validity, cut score studies, and stand setting are all important. The success of these psychometric niceties rests on effective communications with stakeholder.

Communication seems so obvious, why would we even need to discuss it? Last February, during my workshop on Improving the Quality of Your Certification Program, we were discussing the importance of communication to quality. We all agreed that lots of communication happens, but often communication doesn’t occur in an organized and deliberate fashion. As test publishers that use data all the time to evaluate our tests, we forget that communications with stakeholders are important data for planning and evaluating our tests and services. Every participant in the workshop develops their own follow-up project and Dania Eter from NCSBN chose to focus on communication for the NCSBN. Click here to see more about the upcoming workshop in March.

The popularity and confusion about social media sites also became part of the discussion. So many sessions talk about using social media, but often social media is used in a haphazard way. We “have” to be on Facebook because it is the in thing to do – but what do we do with it? Georgia Patrick started talking to Dania and me about being purposeful in social networking, and the idea for developing some positive examples for effective communications in the testing industry was born.

Do you want to learn more about building quality communication programs? Dania Eter (NCSBN), Georgia Patrick (The Communicators) and I encourage you to attend our session on Monday afternoon, Feb. 27 during the Association of Test Publishers [MSOffice1] national conference from Feb. 26-29 at Westin Mission Hills, Rancho Mirage, CA. Our presentation will give you just a little theory about why communication is essential and to move on to examples from the Certified Commission of Healthcare Interpreters, the NCSBN, the Board of Certification for the Athletic Trainer, the National Institute for Certification in Engineering Technologies, the Woodwork Career Alliance of North America, and the Security Industry Association.