In a blog post, eCom explains that those involved in the professional institutes' sector face mission-critical issues like

• ensuring people want to join, and stay with, our institute
• attracting and supporting a younger demographic in terms of membership
• establishing a strong infrastructure and effective online processes
• collecting meaningful data and managing it effectively - online - to help our members be more productive and advance their careers

These issues - and effective ways of solving them - are interconnected, argues guest blogger Bob Little, whose work in the online learning technologies sector is known around the world.

Bob's research points to fact that younger people, whom institutes are keen to attract into membership, increasingly want information and other career support - notably qualification information and assessment - delivered online. In addition, technology makes the collection, monitoring, and management of members' professional activities easier in terms of continuous professional development (CPD) and qualifications.

His article explains that online, or eAssessments, can

• improve the assessment process and streamline internal operations
• be applied in all areas where competency needs to be demonstrated
• provide a faster and highly cost-effective solution, compared with paper-based systems
• reduce the time and administration burden involved in the qualifications process - saving a professional institute time and money
• track and report on the wide range of information required for compliance auditing, producing secure data and real-time definitive evidence to show members' competency in particular subject areas. This enables the institute to target recommendations to support members to help them improve their competency via CPD.

"eAssessment offers organisations many advantages over a traditional paper-based approach to assessment," agreed Linda Steedman, Chair of eCom Learning Solutions. "These include cost savings, convenience, ease of marking, and speeding up the process of the qualifications being awarded as the result of the assessments.

"And now that candidates receive a digital badge instead of a paper certificate, they can display this on their social media profiles - allowing them to demonstrate the qualifications they hold."

The article sets out how eCom is working with an international professional institute in the oil and gas sector to monitor student progress, automatically mark online tests, record practical assessments, manage and verify certificates, as well as deal with question authoring and multiple translation versions. Among other things, this solution - known as FORUM - enables candidates to register, update their details, locate a centre, and participate in assessments, and also allows external users such as employers to authenticate and check the validity of a certificate.