Testing students to find out their skills and skill level is time consuming for both students and employers. There is little value to students from typical tests unless they get the role. Exercism.io provides a platform for students to prove their ability while learning and getting feedback on their skills. Employers can ensure that a student's ability is at their preferred standard.

Takeaways:

• There is currently a gap in demonstrating a graduate student's technical ability. 

• Testing is beneficial to an employer but provides little to no value to students.

• Exercism.io allows students to practice skills and prove ability and get feedback to learn. Employers can see students solving problems up to an industry agreed standard.

It’s common practice for employers to "decode" tertiary courses and degrees to understand the depth and breadth of students' technical knowledge. 

Tertiary providers have their own curriculum covering technical topics. These courses use various approaches to teach technical fundamentals. Employers have the challenge of figuring out a candidate's capabilities by trying to decode all the different tertiary curriculums. And this process doesn't provide a sense of the quality of the teaching at that institution. 

To resolve this issue, many employers have a couple of approaches to understanding a candidate's ability:

1) Employers review candidates' code via a submission or public repository like GitHub. 

2) Employers ask the student to complete a technical skills test to gauge a candidate's ability.  

There are problems with both of these approaches:

Code reviews 

First, a candidate's code may not demonstrate what facets an employer would like to see. Candidates need to be better educated on preparing their code samples for an employer. More often than not, there is minimal ROI for an employer to inspect a student's code sample. 

Technical Skills testing

This is a common approach by employers to test via their own internal testing process or via testing websites. Testing provides good visibility of a candidate's ability, but it requires a significant investment of time from the candidate. Our research has shown students may take over 10 tests before getting a job during recruitment season. This is a substantial investment of time for students. Typically there is very little feedback for a candidate on how they did or how they could improve. This also doesn't consider the stress and anxiety of candidates taking multiple tests. 

What if employers could see a candidate's ability that covers the right facets of technical skills, and the candidate could practise these skills and get feedback about their work? 

Introducing Exercism.io

Exercism is a free learning platform that allows students to practise their coding skills. The website covers every technical programming language. In completing the exercises, every candidate receives feedback from industry professionals. It is the perfect place for candidates to show their ability and have code samples that the industry can easily understand. 

For every language there are several exercises that cover key programming concepts, e.g. Loops, Objects and Functions. Each of the concepts have several exercises that provide different ways to practise learning the concepts. Most of the learning examples have been translated into each language. This makes it worthwhile for students to demonstrate key concepts regardless of which programming language they use. Employers can have confidence in the quality of the exercises, as they have been designed by industry professionals as a way for people to practise their skills. 

We recommend that companies use Exericism as a testing mechanism for candidates. It provides a good reference for a student's capabilities, and the candidates benefit from the learning and feedback opportunities. The candidates can also use the exercises to demonstrate their ability on their GitHub for prospective employers. Using Exercism would transform a student's GitHub showcasing the student's ability in a much more robust way that employers find valuable. 

Further reading and resources

Web

• Exericism.io

• Using Exercism to help team learning