Assessing Your Resources – How the Diagnostic Assessments Benefit Your Bank

Are you making the most of your training resources? Is your staff receiving appropriate training for their skill level? Are you wondering how to assess the skill level of your staff so that you can accurately answer these two questions? 

RMA’s Diagnostic Assessments of Credit and Lending Skills and Commercial Real Estate Credit and Lending Skills establish a skills baseline and identify training needs. Both assessments facilitate the development of employees who make sound lending and credit decisions, while developing a consistent credit culture within the bank.

RMA devotes significant time and resources to create valid and rigorous assessments. Not everything called a Diagnostic Assessment in the industry is created with the same high standards that RMA demands. So you can be assured that our assessments are accurate and reliable indicators of proficiency. 

Furthermore, the assessments contribute to your bank’s profitability and productivity by targeting limited training dollars in the most needed areas.

How the Credit and Lending Skills Assessment Works

The purpose of the Diagnostic Assessment of Credit and Lending Skills is to identify training needs specific to core competencies in commercial credit and lending skills. The assessment is designed for professionals actively engaged in the commercial credit and lending functions in a bank with a suggested minimum of 24 months experience. This level of experience will vary by type of institution and may, in some cases, relate to someone with as little as 12 months experience to as much as several years of experience. 

The Diagnostic Assessment provides feedback in terms of knowledge, skills and abilities. It identifies the current level of competency and provides an opportunity to enhance individual performance and contribute to improved institutional performance. Individuals will receive an overall competency assessment measure and detailed feedback on specific credit risk concepts.

The assessment will help you determine what training, if any, is required to bring personnel up to prescribed levels of knowledge.

The assessment:

• Can be used regardless of your institutions size
• Can be taken by one individual or by thousands
• Can be taken by C&I lenders with at least 24 months experience

Now There Is One Exam Available to both the U.S. and Canada

The Diagnostic Assessment measures your staff members training need, based on their responses to multiple choice questions in the core credit competency areas:

• Financial Accounting
• Risk Assessment
• Financial Statement Analysis
• Cash Flow Analysis
• Loan Structuring
• Legal and Documentation Issues
• Problem Loan Management

The Diagnostic Assessment is also available in a Canadian English and French version:

• Financial Accounting
• Financial Statement Analysis
• Cash Flow Analysis
• Industry, Business, and Management Risk
• Loan Management
• Loan Structuring
• Legal and Documentation Issues

How the Commercial Real Estate Credit and Lending Skills Assessments Works

The Diagnostic Assessment of CRE Credit and Lending Skills consists of 60 test questions designed to probe for the commercial real estate competency of your commercial real estate lenders. The assessment will help you determine what training, if any, is required to bring personnel up to prescribed levels of knowledge. Additionally, the assessment:

• Can be used regardless of your institution's size.
• Can be taken by one individual or by thousands.
• Can be taken by credit and lending professionals with at least 18 to 30 months of commercial real estate experience who have command of standard credit skills: cash flow, balance sheet and income statement analysis, and tax returns.

Available in U.S. Version

The Diagnostic Assessment of CRE Credit and Lending Skills measures your staff members' training needs based on their responses to multiple-choice questions in six major testing areas:

• Types of CRE Loans, Risk Areas, and Performance Drivers
• CRE Underwriting Process
• Financing and Monitoring Different Types of Properties
• Understanding and Evaluating Leases, Appraisals, and Environmental Assessments
• Loan Structure and Documentation Considerations
• Construction Lending

How the Assessments Were Developed – Built by Bankers for Bankers

Over the past twenty years, tens of thousands of bankers have trusted RMA to test the competency of credit and lending professionals. Who better than your professional peers to set the standards for RMA's Diagnostic Assessments?

Under RMA's direction, separate panels of experienced commercial bankers and bank training directors in the U.S. and Canada (for the Credit and Lending Skills Assessment only) developed specific questions reflective of the content and intent of each assessment's competency or testing area. Respondents' answers to the questions serve as a measure of their skills—their competency in each area, and, therefore, in the entire discipline of commercial lending and credit risk or commercial real estate lending and credit risk.

Periodically, RMA engages a team of content specialists to revise the competencies and questions. Pilot sessions with different banks consistently show an extremely high level of both reliability and validity. In other words, the Diagnostic Assessments will do precisely what they are intended to do and in a consistent, dependable manner.

Available in RMA University Online brought to you by eMentor^®

Both Diagnostic Assessments are components of RMA University Online brought to you by eMentor, a comprehensive, online industry research and training tool for credit and lending professionals. Specifically, they reside within the Assessment Center, a suite of state-of-the-art assessment tools, which includes eCases, the Fundamentals Exam, and the RMA-CRC Practice Exam. The Assessments can be purchased by eMentor subscribers for an additional fee, or they can be purchased on their own.

As an eMentor subscriber, the Diagnostic Assessment allows you to evaluate your staff's skills and then link them directly to specific materials within eMentor that can fill in any gaps in knowledge. For moderate training needs, the Diagnostic Assessment modules link directly to specific materials in eMentor and serve as a one-stop learning source to meet identified training needs. If significant needs are identified, eMentor will recommend attendance at instructor-led courses.

We invite you to look over the Diagnostic Assessments brochure (PDF). To find out more about RMA’s Diagnostic Assessments contact your regional manager.