2022 was a milestone year! 25 years in business, expanded services, and industry recognition are just some highlights of what we accomplished together.
2022 was a milestone year for Avilar! We marked 25 years in business, expanded services to new and existing customers, earned industry recognition for our thought leadership, and continued product enhancements to help our clients solve their workforce issues.
To those customers who joined the Avilar community in 2022 – and those who have been with us for years (or decades!) – we say, “thank you!” Here’s a glimpse of what we’ve accomplished together.
Avilar Celebrates 25th Anniversary
When Avilar CEO Tom Grobicki co-founded the company in 1997, he knew he wanted to do something different. He’d seen too many business leaders make important workforce decisions (such as layoffs or reorganizations) without any visibility into what skills they were keeping. Sometimes, those decisions worked out. More often, results of those changes were not successful. Either way, they simply didn’t know why.
Tom believed that strategic business and workforce decisions based on data about skills and competencies would lead to better results and repeatable success. As a technologist, Tom saw that software could help leaders do just that – implement competency-based strategies and processes to develop a workforce and company that thrives.
Joe Jaynes, our Director of Customer Operations, joined the company in 2000. Over the years, Tom and Joe have worked together to advance Avilar’s products and practices to support leaders through the many market and technology evolutions. They have proudly supported organizations across industries to increase profitability, improve workforce allocation, and enhance productivity.
Here’s to the first 25 years of Avilar!
Flexibly Supporting Workforce Management Initiatives
One of the reasons Avilar has been around this long is that our flexible software solutions are built to conform to each organization’s needs, not the other way around! Avilar’s WebMentor Skills™ is our skills management software, helping organizations identify, analyze, and manage workforce skills gaps. WebMentor LMS™ is our learning management system designed for small-to-mid-size enterprises to quickly and easily deliver and track training and tests.
Corporations, government agencies, associations, and training companies are using one or both of our products to benefit their organizations, their employees, and their customers. Of course, many organizations are routinely conducting skills assessments to identify and close skills gaps or delivering online learning to support employee or customer skill development. Where our products have the most impact is within companies that have identified a workforce issue and are harnessing technology to support their goals.
Where our products have the most impact is within companies that have identified a workforce issue and are harnessing technology to address it.
Here’s just a sampling of initiatives that current customers are managing with our products:
- Gap Analysis. A large (6,000 employees) defense organization is using the system for gap analysis, development planning, and career development for their General Schedule (GS) employees. The system helps leaders determine readiness of the GS workforce to complete mission requirements.
- Job Placement and Rotation Cycles. One international organization – the equivalent of the state department for a foreign country – uses the system to handle their full job placement and rotation cycles for in-country and embassy positions. The process involves all steps of the cycle, from employees submitting their preferences, to selection, rating, and, finally, issuing transfer letters for the next placement.
- Leave Management. One country’s worldwide embassies are using the system to handle leave for local employees in more than 50 countries. In this case, the system provides a mechanism to define the various leave types, uphold leave allocation rules, and deliver the reporting required for local staff.
Award-Winning Thought Leadership
Avilar was named a 2022 eLearning Learning MVP Award winner! Our blog, 7 Ways an LMS Can Strengthen Your Competency Management Program, was a 2022 winner in the eLearning Tools category.
The awards recognize the “Most Valuable Posts” on the content aggregation platform, as judged by their readers, awards committee, machine intelligence, and social media. According to the award organizers, they “recognize the posts that provide the highest value to industry professionals – useful and actionable information, that is tactical or strategic in nature, providing either long-term or short-term value.”
In fact, for each of the past five years, Avilar has been recognized as a winner or finalist:
Winning Blogs
Finalist Blogs
Ongoing Product Advancements
Over our years of working with small and mid-sized organizations, we’ve addressed an eclectic mix of challenges by adding fields to a screen, inserting a step in a workflow, or repurposing existing features. We’re proud that our systems are enormously flexible. But that doesn’t stop us from making ongoing advancements and improvements.
WebMentor Skills
Here are just a few recent enhancements to support a range of client use cases:
- AI-based leave management system – Allows an organization to create complex leave scenarios that are particularly useful for meeting international leave requirements
- Configurable position and opening management system – Capable of handling complex candidate and applicant scenarios based upon quality judgements of participants, including capabilities of solving competing selection processes
- Complete correspondence management system – Designed to meet complex notification requirements for job transfers and new position assignments
- Full professional license management capability – Allows organizations to keep track of employee licenses
- Tailorable skills assessment – Allows for multi-player assessments with approval processing, side-by-side comparison, and collection of any data associated with the skill
WebMentor LMS – Gamification
With new “gamification” features, learners are incentivized to achieve visible milestones and optionally to compete with themselves and others to accomplish learning goals.
- Points for Participation – An Organization may choose to award “points” to learners for participating in a wide range of activities
- Rewards for Extraordinary Participation – An Organization can specify that learners who have earned a specified number of points for participating in specific activities will receive “rewards”. The Organization may define the reward however it likes and/or assign a “badge” that learners receive as part of the reward.
- Built-in Badge Library – WebMentor LMS now offers a built-in badge library containing several icons that can be used for rewards. An Organization may also upload its own badge icons, if preferred.
- Leader Board – The Leader Board ranks the top achievers in each activity for which the Organization awards points, and is visible to the Organization and its Administrators, Instructors and Students.
Looking Ahead to 2023 (and Beyond)
Whatever the economic, political, or market conditions, business leaders have an interest in understanding the skills, knowledge, abilities, and behaviors of their employees. They want a “dashboard” to show current skill sets and how well those abilities map to targeted jobs, so they can make informed business and workforce decisions.
We know that skills and focused training gives companies access to a broader talent pool that enhances diversity and helps to future-proof a workforce. As we step into 2023, we’re ready and eager to continue helping organizations to make data-driven decisions to successfully navigate the business and workforce challenges and opportunities ahead.
Thanks for including us in your journey!
If you’re looking for ways to adopt a competency-driven approach to workforce management, download our Competency Management Toolkit to get started. Or contact us to find out how Avilar’s WebMentor Skills™ competency management systems may support your next steps.
RELATED RESOURCES
How Competencies Help You Overcome the Halo Effect in the Workplace
How to Choose Government Competency Management Technology
Hiring for Skills: It’s the First Good Step for Great Changes
How Competencies Can Strengthen Your Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Plans
5 Advantages of a Competency-Based Approach to Solving Workforce Issues
