3: Finding the Gap

Your response to the second question in the first exercise – Why are they not doing these things? – will help you formulate the gap, which is the difference between how your learners are performing presently and how you would like them to perform.

Types of gaps

There are five possible learning gaps, again adapted from Julie Dirksen’s Design for How People Learn:

• Knowledge – Do your learners have the information they need to be successful?
• Skills – Do learners need more support and practice to develop skills that are key to success?
• Motivation – Are learners resistant due to attitude, anxiety, distraction or other motivation-related issues?
• Environment – Are there environmental roadblocks to performing as desired, like a lack of tools?
• Communication – Is the performance issue rooted in miscommunication of information between management and the learners?

Identifying the gaps at play is important because, in general, there are two things to be gained from a training program: knowledge or skills. In cases where an individual or team performance is directly linked to a knowledge or skill deficit, training can be highly impactful.  But if this is not the case, then a training program may not be the most appropriate intervention.

Data Gathering Tactics

One basic way to help determine why learners are not performing in the desired way – or what type of gap is at play – is to observe a learner who IS performing as desired. Why is he or she successful, when others are not? One method for getting to the root of this question is the 5 Whys technique described in the article below.

Reflection

Using the 5 Whys Technique, can you edit your response to the question “Why are they not doing these things? Try to specify the gap that needs to be bridged for the desired behavior to occur, choosing from the five types of gaps introduced in this section: knowledge, skills, motivation, environment, and communication.