Quiz your community

I shared the Tableau Skills Quiz recently as a great way to help you and your community, so in this post, I'll share what I mean and provide you with a better understanding how two simple and cost effective tools will benefit your Tableau community.  

Note: While this post is written from the Tableau perspective, you can apply it to any tool or testable skill. 

What's a skills quiz

• An interactive quiz that helps people objectively understand their skill level
• Helps Tableau admins/COEs learn more about their community
• Provides personalized learning recommendations

How it works

Watch this short video of what the experience is like for someone to go through the quiz and get their results. This video has no sound.

There are a few different ways you can implement a quiz. The most popular is a personality test (aka correlated results), weighted score (where answers are assigned point values), and an assessment quiz (correct/incorrect).  You can also use branching logic, where it takes people down a certain path of questions based on a prior response.  In the sample quiz, I used the weighted score so that I could still segment people into one of three skill levels. 

Once the  quiz is built, you can embed it in a webpage so that traffic is drawn to your page versus the quiz platform used. You can also build pages for each result so that you can easily customize the page. This is where recommendations and resources can live. 

How quiz tech helps efficiently enable and upskill your community

Here's a visual workflow of how a quiz works. 

Once someone takes the quiz, they can get their results (either through skipping an opt-in or by providing their email address). When they provide their email, you can segment them to send them information that is pertinent to their results.  No need to send a beginner some information on LOD calcs and crazy hacks.  You can also analyze the data you get from the quiz platform to learn more and inform your training and enablement strategy because it's a treasure trove of data. 

The tools & workflow get this in production

First, I'll say, I'm biased because I used Interact quiz platform* when I had my quiz side biz for online coaches, so that's what I used in the example quiz.  There are other platforms out there, so it may just be a matter of ease of use, cost, and infosec approval. Other platforms include Quiz-Maker, and more. 

To leverage sending communications relevant to someone skill level (or how they answered key questions), you'll need an email service provider (like Mailer-Lite, MailChimp, etc). 

Can we afford this? Is this a good investment?

Depending on your company, this set up can cost about $1000/year.  To help justify the cost, here's a  rough analysis you can perform to justify it. 

1. What is $1k of an average salary?
2. Calculate $1k in terms of hours
3. How much time (in hours) per year do you spend answering emails to provide training recommendations (include the disruption/time to get back to what you were working on as part of this calculation)
4. Calculate the Annual ROI

Here's an example:

The worksheet that includes the formulas can be found here.

You can also look at the opportunity cost of the hours spent on serving your community by comparing it to your backlog.  What else can you do if you had those 25 hours back? 

Time is finite and this is one way that a skills quiz can help you and your community use their time effectively.   If you dive deep into how quizzes can help you be more efficient and effective in your enablement, message me on LinkedIn. 

*This is a referral link because I love the platform so much. It doesn't cost anything to you, but it does help me. If you don't want to use the referral link, that's totally cool. Here's the non-referral link to the Interact.