Pluralsight IQ allows engineers to compare skills and proficiencies

Pluralsight is announcing a new tool this morning to help satiate our innate desire to compare ourselves against one another. Pluralsight IQ is designed to assist developers in assessing their competencies and determining their proficiencies relative to their peers.

Engineers taking the test are assigned scores between zero and 300 along with an indicator of attainment — novice, proficient or expert. The free test consists of 20 questions and takes about five minutes to complete. The “IRIS” quotient produced is updatable as more engineers take and repeat the test.

From an enterprise perspective, managers can pay to tap into deeper analytics for their specific organization. These dashboards can be informative for the allocation of developers within large companies.

Businesses can also identify custom learning paths for internal IT teams, helping to move the needle on challenging skills gaps. At its core, Pluralsight makes its business out of paid online education. There are pretty clear parallels between identifying internal gaps and offering salves for said organizations.

Pluralsight doesn’t advocate using its benchmarking test as a tool for hiring engineers. Instead, the massive, anonymized, data set enables enterprises to gain a higher level view into core competencies across organizations.