Skill-gap tests aim at providing profile information on a students' abilities and disabilities. This information enhances the organization’s strategic capability of building robust personalized learning paths according to company and learner needs.

Skill-gap tests. together with the subsequent Skill-Gap Analysis, comprise a methodology to identify the skills that users are currently missing and can potentially have a negative effect on their performance inside the organization.

Results of Skill-gap tests can be then used for employee evaluation, job assignment proposition or courses assignment which is the point of particular interest within the LMS framework of eFront.

In this respect, the skill-gap related functionality of an LMS aims at:

• Assigning courses to the system’s users, whose results demonstrate insufficient knowledge or possession of certain skills that are required (critical skills) or useful (non-critical skills) to perform their work adequately.

• Subsequently, but equally importantly, not assigning courses to those employees who are proficient enough in the skills required.

Creating a skill gap test

In order to create a Skill-gap test, you need to log in as an administrator and from your Administration Panel, you will be able to see the 'Skill-gap tests' option (1).

Next, you will see a list of all Skill-gap tests you already have created, or nothing if you have not created anything yet.

Clicking on the option 'Add Skill-gap test' (2) will get you to the next screen, where you can create a Skill-gap test and define its properties.

To create a Skill-gap test you need to set the following properties:

• Name - The name of the Skill-gap test; make sure that is something descriptive.
• Tested Skills - This is a list of skills to be tested with this Skill-gap test.
• Who will take the test - Defines who is going to take this test. You have two options here: the first is “All new users”, meaning all newly registered users in your system; the second is “I'll select users later”, meaning that you will choose among the list of all users who are going to take the test. You will be able to do this after you set up the main properties of the test.
• The test must be done - This field specifies when your users are going to take the test. There are three available options - “Whenever” (users can take the test whenever they schedule themselves), “Until specific date” (users will have to complete the test until the date you specified), and “Next login” (users will be prompted to take the test the next time they log in to the system, they will not be able to proceed to any other action until they complete the test).

Note: Some properties are mandatory while others are optional. Mandatory fields are noted with an asterisk(*).

The above are the standard options you can set for a Skill-gap test. More settings, like those that can be applied to the tests, are available afterward while editing the skill gap test.

After saving your new test you are transferred to the Questions tab (3) in order to select the questions you want to use.  

The questions that have already been connected with the tested skill(s) (4) are going to appear first in your Skill-gap test questions selection, but if you need more questions from other courses you will be able to get them by clicking on “Show all questions” button (5). If you need to define a new question, you will have to create it in some course and then come back here to add it to your Skill-gap test.

Note: The skills are assigned to the course questions during their creation, through the advanced settings.

In case you want to include in your Skill-gap test some question that is not associated with some skill that this test examines, you can always do so. You will notice though that when you add this question to your test a pop up will appear asking you if you would like to associate this question with some specific skill or set of skills (6). You may choose to perform the association or not before this question is included in your test.

When you are done adding questions to your skill gap test, you can either go back to the Test tab (7) in order to edit it further and set up some advanced settings (8):

or move to the Users tab (9) if you want to manually assign the test to the users: