InformationWeek

Brainbench has provided online certification since January 1999, but until now the company has administered and stored exams at its Web site. "With the Virtual Testing Center, we can integrate assessment results with whatever their corporate system happens to be," says Bill Lake, Brainbench's VP of sales and marketing.

More than 30 companies have signed up for the Virtual Testing Center, which includes other types of employment assessment services beyond certification exams. Among its clients is Manpower Professional, a unit of Manpower Inc. that provides staffing for IT, engineering, telecommunications, and other professional positions.When the integration is complete, visitors will be able to choose an exam from Manpower Professional's site. It's a hosted service, so exams are housed and measured on Brainbench servers.

The results of a worker's or job candidate's test--including scores, industry rankings, and strengths and weakness--can be stored within a company's intranet. Lake says integration with the Brainbench system and a customer's intranet takes about 60 days.

Brainbench was formed in March 1998, after Lake and Brainbench president Mike Russiello left EDS, where they had seen a need for employment-assessment tools. "At one point, Mike was running a $300 million development effort, and there wasn't a good way to find out if people had the right skills for the job," Lake says. Brainbench initially provided online employment assessments for consulting firms such as Ernst & Young and PricewaterhouseCoopers. After a year, they expanded to online certification.

The tests adjust to test-takers' responses. "If they're doing well, they won't have to waste time with easy questions, since exams adapt to skill levels," Lake says. Most certification tests last for a little more than an hour. If a test-taker doesn't answer a question within the designated time frame, his or her response is marked incorrect.

Of the more than 100 Brainbench certification exams available, nearly 90% are IT-related, Lake says. The company is also finding a growing demand for custom certification exams. "Lots of organizations want to increase their sales, so they'll ask us to develop a certification program for channel reps or sales reps," says Lake. By year's end, Brainbench plans to offer 450 exams covering five areas: IT, finance, sales, health care, and general business skills.

Brainbench charges companies $30,000 to $50,000 for the implementation, plus additional fees for maintenance, and $50 per test. Career sites typically aren't charged for tests because the results are included in a job-candidate database that Brainbench sells to recruiters. Individual job seekers who take the tests from those sites can choose to be included in the database.

But while Brainbench's business is growing, some people in the industry are critical of Web-based certification. How can a company tell if a job candidate solicited a friend--who happens to be a Linux wunderkind--to take the Linux certification exam in his stead?

Stacey Saul, continuing education director at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers' Computer Society, says her organization will offer a certification program starting next year, but exams will be supervised at a physical location. "I think online certification is viewed as a little less valid," Saul says. "You can take it at any time, which is great--but you can't guarantee who's taking the test."

Gartner Group analyst Clark Aldrich sees enormous potential for online certification, though he doesn't envision broad acceptance until security issues are addressed. "I'm waiting for biometrics to kick in," such as retinal scans to prove a test-taker's identity, he says.