When we are trying to identify performance gaps that people have the most common gaps that come up are knowledge and skill gaps. But apart from not having the right information which is a knowledge gap and not having the proficiency to do something which is a skill gap, people can also have motivation gaps which affect their ability to perform at the required level.
A motivation gap occurs when a person has the necessary knowledge and skills to do something but chooses not to do it. Motivation gaps can happen for a number of reasons which include:
lack of buy-in into a process or goal
When the goal or process does not make sense
Anxiety or concern about an impending change
Being distracted from the main goal
Lack of interest
Not enough information about the goal to inform them
Motivation gaps are a real challenge to supporting people with learning interventions because lacking motivation is not inherently a learning problem. Most of the responsibility lies with the learner. The question here is, whether anything we do in terms of developing and delivering learning to unmotivated learners can make a difference.
Some believe that isn’t the learning designer’s responsibility while some agree that good design of learning may be able to influence the unmotivated person.
Whatever the case may be, motivation gaps are not the easiest performance gaps to plug with learning and it may well be that the answer lies somewhere else. Learning and development practitioners should never feel that they must have answers to all types of performance gaps.
I’ve been exploring the various types of gaps that can prevent people from performing at the required level. When we as learning and development practitioners conduct a learning needs analysis, our goal is to identify what the performance gaps are that we may need to bridge with some sort of learning intervention. Previously, I looked at knowledge gaps (you can read that post here) and in this post, the focus is on skill gaps.
So, what are skill gaps?
According to Julie Birksen in her book, Design for how people learn,
“Having a skill is different from having knowledge. To determine if something is a skill gap rather than a knowledge gap, you need to ask just one question:
Is it reasonable to think that someone can be proficient without practice?“
If the answer to Julie’s question is no, then you are dealing with a skill gap. Therefore a skill gap describes a situation where practice is required for a person to develop the required proficiency.
Let me steal some more ideas from Julie and her brilliant book. This one is a game that Julie calls the ‘Skill/Not a skill game.
Which of the following is a skill and which is not a skill. Choose ‘Yes‘ for it’s a skill and ‘No‘ for it isn’t a skill.
Saving a file in Microsoft Word – YES or NO?
Playing volleyball – YES or NO?
Giving performance reviews – YES or NO?
Filling out a timesheet – YES or NO?
Calming an irate customer – YES or NO?
Building a database – YES or NO?
Desiging a brochure – YES or NO?
Making mac & cheese from the box – YES or NO?
Problem-solving a missing supply order – YES or NO?
Programming the shopping cart widget for a website – YES –NO?
Apart from saving a Microsoft Word file, filling out a timesheet, and making macaroni and cheese from the box which can be done by using information (they are knowledge gaps) all the others require some practice and are therefore skill gaps.
How did you do with the game? Did you arrive at the same conclusion?
Irrespective of what your answers to the game were, remember that skill gaps are where developing the required proficiency needs a degree of practice.
In a previous post (read it here), I wrote about the different performance gaps we need to consider when identifying learning needs with the aim of developing and delivering a learning intervention such as training. The first of these gaps is knowledge gaps.
What are knowledge gaps?
To perform people need the right information and when they have the right information then they can use it to do something. A knowledge gap, therefore, is when people don’t have the right information to do something or perform as required. Having the right information in itself is not enough to perform until people actually use it to do something. But having the right information is necessary as a starting point for performance.
If all a learner has is a knowledge gap then giving them the information they need should not be too much of a chore. You probably don’t need to design a training course to do that. There are various cost-effective ways to provide people with information. The other good thing about the knowledge gap is that to deal with them you can provide people with the information as and when they need it. We have the technology to do that.
Here’s a personal example.
Once in a while, I send out an email that I need to recall and delete. Because I don’t do this task often I forget how to do it. I don’t need a training course for that. In fact, if I did do a training course to let me how to do it I would have forgotten it by the next time I need to do the task. For me, this is a knowledge gap and I just need the right information to recall and delete the email so I just do a Google search for the information and complete the task. Simple as that. I call that just-in-time learning because Google provides me with the information I need just when I need it and that’s a great way to deal with a knowledge gap.
Sometimes though what we call a knowledge gap isn’t actually a knowledge gap. Let me illustrate this with an example.
During the COVID pandemic, my organisation had to move all mandatory training courses online because no one was allowed to meet in confined spaces for face-to-face training. One of those courses was Moving and Handling training. This course is necessary for us because we support elderly people who need support with movement and it needs to be done properly. Doing the training in the classroom, participants do a lot of hands-on practice and they have to demonstrate their competence before the end of the session.
But during the pandemic, we provided them with information on how to do the maneuvers in the form of some written content blended with videos. It’s clear that though the course would have been okay if we were trying to meet a knowledge gap, it was not appropriate for moving and handling which is more of a skill gap than a knowledge gap.
What I’m saying here is that before you provide information as the solution, be clear that you are dealing with a knowledge gap. Otherwise, you will not solve the problem.
Here’s another example that Julie Dirksen wrote about in her book, Design for how people learn.
“I recently worked with a client on a project to teach salespeople how to create a product proposal for potential clients. The salespeople need to be able to:
Choose which product best meets a client’s needs
Select a series of options so that the product is optimally customized for that client
We were working on revising an old course in which there were four slides that simply listed each of the product features. And that was it. Hmm. If you were learning this, do you think this equation adds up? No, of course not—even if the learners memorized the exact information on each of those slides, that wouldn’t mean they would be able to use it well. But certainly, it is always critical to start by providing the right information to the learner.”
From the example above, it’s clear that just providing information was not going to solve the problem because the gap was clearly not a knowledge gap. Probably a skills gap which is the subject of the next post.
LearnaBytes 