(277)E-TESTING AS A SELF-ADAPTIVE LEARNING TOOL INENTERPRISE ENVIRONMENTS: A CASE STUDY FOR ROMANIANCONSULTING FIRMS

摘要

The need for continuous development of professional competences is commonlyaccepted by both European public forums and private firms: competences are seen asfortune generators, as a key factor for achieving the competitive advantage in knowledgesociety.Being aware of the fact that certifications granted by well-known professionalassociations would raise the customers’ trust on the capacities of an organization toimplement successful projects, managers advise their employees to turn their attention tothis method of improving personal portfolios.In Romania, a well-known association that provides proves of professional abilities is theRomanian Association of Project Management, which is affiliated to the InternationalProject Management Association (IPMA). One of the tools made available by theAssociation for the preparation process is CertExam, a web based assessment tool forproject management competences: www.pm.org.ro/certexam. The paper reveals thecorrelation between the use of an e-testing application for project managementcompetences (CertExam) and the increase of performance in Romanian consulting firms.For this purpose, a study was made to seven small and medium Romanian firms, whichprovide consulting in the field of project management, financial advisory and directingprofitable investments.The paper has five sections, structured as follows:The first section presents the state of the art regarding learning in project management.The second section describes the environment for the developed study: the governingvariables for using the CertExam e-testing tool in the competences development process.The third section presents the applied research methodology. The data were collectedfrom various sources: the database of the e-testing application, the interviews with theemployees and the reports provided by the firms’ managers. The methods of analyzingthe data were both qualitative, by observations and quantitative, by statisticmeasurements.The forth section of the article points out the insights of the e-testing tool, as a serviceoriented application and its features which made it a self-adaptive learning tool. Theparticipation to the development process of the computer based application helped usobserving its role in knowledge creation chain for the employees.The fifth section of the article draws some conclusions regarding the role of eassessmentin the learning landscape of today’s society.We observed that there is a direct impact of the e-testing application, namely CertExam,on the amount of knowledge held by consultants and, consequently, to the firmperformance. Also, we noticed that the periodic use of this tool improved the consultants’knowledge and, though, increased the number of satisfied clients for the consideredfirms.The paper is a valuable contribution to the project management e-learning domain. Theauthors of the paper can state that the use of technology in continuous education mighthave a tremendous impact on economic recovery.