SmartForce will incorporate into its suite of offerings SkillScape’s competency management-based solutions that enable enterprises to assess organizational and individual knowledge gaps, relative to strategic business goals, and then to customize learning interventions accordingly. This system provides organizations with highly customizable solutions that align employee knowledge and skills to business strategy.
The SkillScape competency management system comes pre-configured with hundreds of job profiles and thousands of skills definitions, which have already been mapped to SmartForce
e-Learning content associated with developing those skills. More than just a powerful e-Learning offering, the system supports career development programs, project staffing programs and other human capital management initiatives.
The SkillScape competency management system ensures that employees have the right skills for the jobs that are key to implementing specific business strategies by identifying knowledge, skill, and performance gaps. Based on this information, learning solutions can be meticulously designed to build competencies that will help organizations execute their initiatives. The addition of SkillScape competency management further expands the capabilities of the SmartForce learning platform in meeting specific corporate, results-focused learning applications.
Employees are the drivers of company strategy. When competency management is closely linked to strategy, SmartForce learning solutions can have a direct role in helping enterprises leverage their employees’ skills. As a result, employees achieve their performance potential and enterprises increase productivity and profitability. A Skills Dictionary with over 10,000 behaviorally-anchored skills definitions in business, management, finance, marketing, information technology, communications, networking, engineering, science and trades is integrated into the competency solution, as well as over 350 job profiles all mapped to SmartForce e-Learning content. With a learning infrastructure that supports content, technology and services, SmartForce will deliver competency management through an open application architecture featuring collaboration and customization tools and advanced learning and content management systems.
As SmartForce continues its execution of delivering learning that helps companies implement their strategic business initiatives, the acquisition of SkillScape will elevate enterprises to a higher level of e-Learning customization and will give them another dimension for more precise tailoring of their learning programs.
SmartForce anticipates that it will issue approximately 175,000 American Depository shares to the holders of SkillScape’s outstanding capital stock. The acquisition is expected to close during the third quarter of 2001, and is subject to standard closing conditions as set forth in the definitive agreement.
SmartForce, with its advanced learning technology continues to maintain a position of leadership in the industry, and with this leadership SmartForce provides its customers with the best, most comprehensive solutions, said Colin Houghton, CEO of SkillScape. Competency management, as a function of strategic planning, will help enterprises take full advantage of their learning programs.
Competency management from SkillScape will help our customers apply learning to the real business challenges that they are experiencing. Customizing solutions according to skills gaps is a powerful feature of SmartForce’s industry-leading platform, said Greg Priest, chairman and CEO of SmartForce. This acquisition will provide the market with a another tool for targeting solutions to achieve business objectives and will bring our customers closer to realizing the full potential of e-Learning.
SOURCE: COMPANY PRESS RELEASE
