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I've often wondered why there is no general scale to visually show a persons proficiency in technology/hardware/software. Is there such a thing?

Something like... I could fill-out a questionnaire asking a series of questions to determine my abilities in a program lets say MS Word, Excel, Windows XP and Ubuntu.

Lets say I scored... (just guessing at percentages assuming knowing all there is to know about the software is 100%)

  • MS Word 60% (showing proficiency to create and edit documents with some styling abilities... no advanced templates nor VBA)
  • MS Excel 80% (high use of formulas, templates, printing... no VBA)
  • Windows XP 50% (basic install, operation no recovery customizing...)
  • Ubuntu 0% (never played that game... ;P)

Now that I have a baseline, could I not assume that the learning curve for MS PowerPoint will be small compared to learning Linux. This scale could be used to explain learning curves for any program granted the programs where independently aligned to the scale.

Is there such a thing? Is this possible to make? (or should I stop now)

PS: I could use a scale like this to graphically show my personal experience. In fact this is why I'm asking. I'm updating my resume and need to show my various/wide-ranging experience.

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is there a scale to measure people's proficiency on social interactions? you could apply this question to almost anything and the answer will be either: why? or too complex. – Naoise Golden Dec 15 '11 at 2:18
What research have you done? If you're not sure where to start, Google "standardized testing" and "certification." Per the FAQ, this site is for "user experience researchers and designers." Your question might fit here if you were looking for a way to screen participants for usability testing and you demonstrated prior research into the subject. Since your motivation is to update your resume, I'm afraid you've come to the wrong place. – Patrick McElhaney Dec 15 '11 at 13:34
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closed as off topic by Patrick McElhaney Dec 15 '11 at 13:34

Questions on User Experience - Stack Exchange are expected to generally relate to user experience, within the scope defined in the faq.

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I see where you're going with this... Not sure it's a UX question but it's still interesting. My guess is, there are too many variables to be able to do something like this to a level of accuracy that would allow you to compare yourself with other people in your labor pool... which, it would seem to me, is one of the goals of a resume. Another goal, though, is simply to signal that you have at least some kind of verified knowledge. For this, we have projects like Mozilla's Open Badges project, which aims to allow professionals to collect skills, verified by their peers.

W3Schools makes some money by letting people take certification tests for various programming languages... that accomplishes something similar.

I'm not saying what you're imagining is impossible; you might be able to create quizzes measuring someone's knowledge of how to perform a certain task in a certain application or language, but you'd have to have a lot of them covering all the various objectives and specialties people might be looking to demonstrate on a resume.

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Very UX related: it's about user testing. :) – Matt Rockwell Dec 14 '11 at 19:14
Ah, well when you put it that way... Very true. – Evan Dec 16 '11 at 15:09
Oops you were right, I missed the last sentence about the resume – Matt Rockwell Dec 16 '11 at 15:15
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