What is your role at Veolia Energie Performance and what topics do you manage today?

I mainly work on technical skills assessment programmes. I am involved in designing assessment questionnaires together with our business experts and in deploying them among our candidates and employees.

Assessments are used in two main contexts. The first is to evaluate candidates’ level of expertise during recruitment processes and complement the information gathered during interviews. The second is to identify our employees’ development needs in order to offer them the most appropriate training programmes.

Why are technical skills particularly strategic in your business?

Our technicians work directly at our clients’ sites on installations that are often critical. They must be able to quickly identify problems, carry out the appropriate interventions, and ensure that equipment continues to operate correctly.

We work with companies from a wide range of sectors — including Defence, automotive, transport and pharmaceuticals — which all share the same characteristic: a very high level of expectation. In this context, a lack of technical expertise can have significant consequences: unresolved failures, business interruptions or a deterioration in the quality of service provided to the customer.

In addition, our professions cover extremely diverse fields. A technician may work on refrigeration systems, steam production, water treatment or electrical equipment. The skills required therefore vary greatly depending on the activity and the client. It is essential that technicians have full mastery of their area of expertise in order to respond effectively to the challenges they encounter in the field.

How were skills assessments managed before Experquiz?

Historically, assessments were mainly based on paper questionnaires. Results existed, but they were difficult to analyse and were rarely reused over time.

We did not really have a structured system for monitoring skills or supporting recruitment and training decisions. Assessments were carried out occasionally, without any real continuity afterwards.

What was your need when you started working with Experquiz?

Above all, we wanted a tool capable of professionalising our assessment approach.

The objective was to make assessments easier to carry out, including remotely, while maintaining a certain level of control over how they were conducted. We also wanted to centralise results and have a reliable database to support more objective recruitment decisions and better target training initiatives.

Experquiz met these expectations well thanks to a platform that is easy to use, accessible and flexible enough to adapt to our organisation.

You have built a particularly structured skills framework. Can you explain how it works?

We have indeed created a skills framework that now forms the foundation of our assessment approach.

For each profession, we have defined four main skill areas: knowledge, maintenance, job-specific skills and operational management. Each of these skills is then broken down into four levels of expertise.

This gives us a matrix of sixteen skill blocks. Questionnaires are built directly around this structure. Each skill and each level are assessed through several questions, resulting in a total of 48 questions for each professional questionnaire.

This allows us to reconstruct a kind of skills puzzle for each employee.

Building this framework represented a significant amount of work. We involved our business experts to define the expected skills, write the questions and validate the entire assessment system.

How has this framework transformed your approach to training and skills development?

This framework now allows us to directly connect assessment results with training actions.

When an employee does not reach the expected level in one of the puzzle pieces, we can precisely identify the skill concerned and the level of expertise that needs to be strengthened in order to offer the appropriate training.

We have also developed training modules linked to the different skills and levels within the framework. The objective is to progressively support employees’ skills development by focusing on the areas that genuinely require further improvement.

Assessment is therefore no longer used only to measure a level of knowledge. It enables us to precisely identify development needs and build targeted skills development pathways.

How do you currently use these assessments in your recruitment processes?

Assessments also play an important role in our recruitment processes.

They allow us to make interviews more objective and compare candidates’ declared skills with their actual knowledge. When someone presents themselves as an expert in a specific field, we can verify their real level through their assessment results.

In some cases, assessments also reveal inconsistencies that might not appear during an interview. For example, we have seen candidates achieve excellent results at advanced levels while experiencing difficulties with more fundamental concepts. The test progression indicators then provide valuable insights to interpret results and refine the analysis of the candidate profile.

Assessments therefore help us secure recruitment decisions and identify more accurately the areas where support or training may be required.

How did employees respond to this assessment approach?

As is often the case when introducing an assessment system, there were some initial questions and concerns.

Some employees were worried that they might be judged or penalised based on their results. We therefore spent considerable time explaining the purpose of the approach and showing that the objective was not to control people, but to support their professional development.

Today, teams fully understand that these assessments are designed to identify training needs and support their progression. Employees now see the approach as something that provides added value and helps them develop their expertise.

How did the platform deployment and support from the Experquiz teams go?

Given the structure we wanted to build around our skills framework, we quickly needed to have regular discussions with the Experquiz teams.

Although the platform is easy to use, we had many questions and needed advice on certain settings. We therefore worked closely with Cyrille throughout the project.

His availability, responsiveness and expertise enabled us to move forward with confidence and gradually make full use of the different possibilities offered by the platform.

Did you adapt the platform to meet specific needs?

Yes. We requested several adjustments, particularly regarding assessment confidentiality.

For example, we wanted certain groups of users to be able to view results without having access to the detailed content of the questions. This separation was important to protect assessment confidentiality and prevent questionnaires from being widely shared within the company.

The Experquiz teams reviewed this request and adapted certain access rights to meet our internal requirements. This allowed us to better separate information according to user profiles while maintaining access to the data required by recruiters, managers and HR teams.

What are your main projects today regarding skills assessment?

We are continuing to roll out the system across our different regions and business areas.

One of our next challenges is to make better use of assessment data in order to gain a more comprehensive view of the skills available within the company and identify development needs.

We are also closely following developments in artificial intelligence. We have recently started discussions with the Experquiz teams on these topics, particularly around questionnaire creation and the new possibilities offered by these technologies.

Why is Experquiz particularly well suited to your business?

We needed a professional tool that was easy to use and flexible enough to meet the requirements of an organisation like ours.

Today, we use it to assess both candidates and employees, manage our skills development strategy and guide training initiatives.

We particularly appreciate its ability to evolve with our needs and support the progressive development of our uses.

It is now a central tool in our approach to assessing and developing technical skills.