Abstract:

The need for continuous development of professional competences is commonly accepted by both European public forums and private firms: competences are seen as fortune generators, as a key factor for achieving the competitive advantage in knowledge society.
Being aware of the fact that certifications granted by well-known professional associations would raise the customers’ trust on the capacities of an organization to implement successful projects, managers advise their employees to turn their attention to this method of improving personal portfolios.
In Romania, a well-known association that provides proves of professional abilities is the Romanian Association of Project Management, which is affiliated to the International Project Management Association (IPMA). One of the tools made available by the Association for the preparation process is CertExam, a web based assessment tool for project management competences: www.pm.org.ro/certexam. The paper reveals the correlation between the use of an e-testing application for project management competences (CertExam) and the increase of performance in Romanian consulting firms. For this purpose, a study was made to seven small and medium Romanian firms, which provide consulting in the field of project management, financial advisory and directing profitable investments.
The paper has five sections, structured as follows:
The first section presents the state of the art regarding learning in project management.
The second section describes the environment for the developed study: the governing variables for using the CertExam e-testing tool in the competences development process.
The third section presents the applied research methodology. The data were collected from various sources: the database of the e-testing application, the interviews with the employees and the reports provided by the firms’ managers. The methods of analyzing the data were both qualitative, by observations and quantitative, by statistic measurements.
The forth section of the article points out the insights of the e-testing tool, as a service oriented application and its features which made it a self-adaptive learning tool. The participation to the development process of the computer based application helped us observing its role in knowledge creation chain for the employees.
The fifth section of the article draws some conclusions regarding the role of e-assessment in the learning landscape of today’s society.
We observed that there is a direct impact of the e-testing application, namely CertExam, on the amount of knowledge held by consultants and, consequently, to the firm performance. Also, we noticed that the periodic use of this tool improved the consultants’ knowledge and, though, increased the number of satisfied clients for the considered firms.
The paper is a valuable contribution to the project management e-learning domain. The authors of the paper can state that the use of technology in continuous education might have a tremendous impact on economic recovery.

Keywords:

E-testing, competences, project management, learning, enterprise environments.