IKM was founded in 1979 as Bookman Consulting in New York City.  The primary business was to provide COBOL consultants to corporate clients. Experience in placing consultants showed that programmers frequently embellished their resumes.  Moreover, the recruiter’s subjection connection with the candidate could impair their judgement of the candidate’s skills resulting in poor placements. To prevent subjective judgements of candidate’s technical skills, Bookman Consulting wrote an objective COBOL test to be administered to all COBOL candidates.  

However, further research of testing methodologies indicated that a unique and bespoken form of adaptive testing allowed the assessment to detail the exact technical strengths and weaknesses of candidates. An adaptive methodology also provided a quicker and more efficient assessment. Hence, Bookman Consulting developed the first adaptive test for COBOL.

With the COBOL adaptive test as a screening tool, the quality of newly hired consultants increased dramatically and ultimately clients began to ask if they could use this test for their own internal hires.  Soon clients began to ask for tests in additional technologies.

Bookman Consulting realized that they had stumbled on a major need of the IT community. In 1987, Bookman Consulting was relaunched as TeckChek, a company dedicated to providing technical assessment for IT skills. TeckChek opened with assessments in seven different mainframe technologies.  To develop new assessments Subject Matter Experts were contracted to create additional technology assessments using the TeckChek proprietary adaptive test engine. By the mid-1990s TeckChek’s assessment library had grown to over 100 different tests.

The tests were provided to a client via a floppy disk which were returned to TeckChek for scoring after the test was completed.  Disks with completed tests were returned for scoring via mail or modem. Although this low-tech communication process limited the acceptance of testing, TeckChek nonetheless garnered a large client base.

In 2001, TeckChek was purchased by Knowledge Universe.  The testing platform was redesigned and moved online.  Once online, IKM assessments became available anywhere in the world with an online connection.  In 2005, Knowledge Universe relaunched TeckChek as International Knowledge Measurement (IKM).

Over the years, IKM launched many product enhancements. In 2004, IKM introduced the TestBuild product enabling clients to create custom assessments from IKM assessments by combining subtopics from multiple assessments into one test that met the client’s specific job description. In 2005, IKM made a move to promote its assessments to the education industry as a way to measure classroom effectiveness with pre- and post-training assessment. The TrainingLink product was added which enabled clients to map individual’s identified weakness to appropriate training.

In 2006, IKM developed a simple authoring tool (TestWrite) which enabled its clients to create their own custom tests that utilize IKM’s unique adaptive testing methodology.  In 2012, IKM introduced a simpler authoring tool (QwikWrite) for clients to create linear tests and easily convert paper-based tests to an electronic delivery and scoring platform.  In 2014, this was enhanced to include Survey capabilities that can be paired with any assessment.

In April 2016, Spiegel Partners purchased IKM TeckChek. Today IKM’s TeckChek adaptive test library has grown to over 400 titles. The IKM test delivery platform has also been integrated with several ATS or LMS and third party testing products covering occupational skills, aptitude tests, language proficiency and coding tests. IKM has offices around the world including the USA, UK, Australia and South Africa.