Time-Savers: Skill Gap Analysis

Most educational and training methods are timeless... exploration, coaching, collaboration and questioning. Though e-learning may be a new medium to many in this group - utilizing it to impart knowledge has a few sweet benefits aside from the realities of cost savings, and qualified instruction.

It maybe that I have been around long enough to see its birth and growth but I like to think of e-learning as enabling-learning and not the silly - electronic "e" - which seems really dusty and archaic as a descriptor for the power of the online medium.

The e-learning materials we will be using to prepare for this certification can be best utilized once one recognizes a major benefit of self-directed study - skill gap analysis.

Skill Gap Analysis can probably best be summarized as the exercise of base-lining your current state against your goal. This process is made infinitely easier with two standard e-learning resources called the pre-test(current level of subject knowledge) and the post-test (goal).
Because information in an e-learning course is "highly refined" - meaning that the development team (the subject matter experts) have already gone through the effort to organize or "chunked out" into a competency and then into topic areas and then into the concepts and facts - the learner is able to trust that a pre-test will give them a realistic baseline for their current state of understand of that topic; thus enabling the learner to move through a course more swiftly or more carefully depending on their familiarity with the topic being taught. The on-line courseware offered in our program even color codes (green or white) your results to make finding your "gaps" easier - so the computer does the "analysis" piece for you.

The time savings one can realize with this method are incredible. Instead of sitting through a traditional lecture class where the instructor HAS to assume that the participants have little to no background knowledge - the self-directed learner can select the correct pieces of their puzzle to match what one already knows with the "new concept" or "new fact" - spending more time "studying" new material and less time "reviewing" already acquired knowledge.

So with that, I hope to encourage you to utilize the pre-test and post-test included in the courseware to customize your learning to FIT you.