Blogs Home  Home  About
Avatar
GAP Skills—What’s the Big Deal?
Posted Friday, May 22, 2009 by Tammy Hopps

Hopefully you have heard of the term GAP skills in your courses.  GAP stands for Graduate Achievement Portfolio and it is the collection of your best work that you submit at the end of your tenure at Rasmussen College.  --More about this another time.  For now, let’s take a look at what the GAP skills are and why they are a big deal. 

GAP skills are also known as transferable skills because they are not specific to one particular job or academic discipline.  They are the skills that are necessary in EVERY career.  These are the skills that successful people possess.  Employers find value in these skills.  Rasmussen College knows the importance of these skills and what having them can do for you, your career, and your life.

The 3 transferable (GAP) skills are:

Communication—this means more than telling things to people.  This means understanding concepts like audience and purpose.  This also means being able to communicate effectively through written words and a variety of media. 

Critical Thinking—are you a problem solver?  Can you analyze a situation and generate multiple solutions?  Can you design a better system to alleviate a problem?  Are you the person your supervisor comes to for creative ideas?  All of these require critical thinking skills.

Information Literacy—do you know when information is needed, where to get it, and if it is credible?   Do you know how to give credit where credit is due to the sources?

It is no accident that your Rasmussen College instructors have you doing research, writing papers and letters, presenting projects, and taking part in role-playing activities. All of these are meant to help you develop and hone these transferable skills.   

Sure, you’ll learn TONS about child development and early childhood education while you’re at Rasmussen College—that’s important.  But here’s the extra bonus—you’ll also learn the skills that can propel you beyond that—beyond the other people who know about early childhood education.  You will be able to demonstrate your mastery of the transferable GAP skills that will set you apart from the others.     

That’s a big deal.

Save To

del.icio.us Furl Reddit Spurl My Yahoo

Comments

If you have a comment or suggestion, post it in the comments section below.

I think that this is a very important thing that we have to complete. This is going to be one of the hardest things for me to accomplish though. I think that for me this is going to be the best thing for me to do although it maybe hard and I may not understand it.
Posted by Jamie on 5/25/2009 12:00:00 AM
Until I began my first class in the ECE program, I had not heard about GAP and I still did not know much other than having to have a portfolio for graduation. I found this post to be interesting because I have now learned more about what I get to do for graduation! Communication, Critical Thinking, and Information Literacy are most important in everyday life. For ECE, communication is a needed skill when working with children, coworkers, and parents. It is important to be able to feel comfortable enough to let a parent know what is going on with their child, teach a child the curriculum and help with any hard times in their little worlds, and even being able to speak feelings with the people one works with. Critical thinking is needed in case a parent comes and has an issue of some sort and you may need to find a way to solve it but also stick with the rules of the center. It is important to be able to think of solutions for a family to feel comfortable with where their child is going each day. A child needs to have a teacher who knows critical thinking so they are able to have a healthy life. They need to be taught how to solve problems and if a teacher does not practice good problem solving, they may never learn. Information Literacy is a great tool for helping to inform parents. Sometimes a certain illness may have gone around and the teacher sends a flier home, or even a curious parent about a learning disability their child may have. Knowing how and where to find such information will help me to build a relationship with that family and also learn about the information on my own so I know in the future.
Posted by Christina Highet on 5/28/2009 12:00:00 AM
I think the learning experience I'm getting from Rasmussen including these GAP skills will be very helpful in progressing my career. Communication is probably the thing I need help with most. I can communicate just fine with people but when it comes to written media I struggle. Through Rasmussen I am learning how to better utilize the resources i have available to me through my school. This is making it a lot easier for me to communicate with my student's parents effectively. I feel more comfortable talking with them knowing they trust my advice and suggestions.
Posted by Katelyn Genzler on 5/31/2009 12:00:00 AM
The GAP skills are very important when attending Rasmussen College, but at times I know I forget that everything I do is followed with me. All of the GAPs mean something to me, but the one most important is the communication, even though I lack it I would like to increase and expand my communications. I feel that I would become a much better speaker and a person of strong beliefs if had the confidence to communicate the way I really want to. Rasmussen is changing lives one day at a time and I know that its changing mine for the better. Critical thinking is a challenge that I think I can be stronger on only because I have so many ideas but don’t know how to put it on paper. Informational is me indeed, I like to be on top of things whether its nation wide or international, just being informational can take you a long way and you learn new things.
Posted by mathilda sabal on 6/1/2009 12:00:00 AM
As the author said, GAP skills that we learn while students at Rasmussen do more than help us succeed as students. GAP skills are the skills that employers will look for, and we will need to use, for the rest of our professional lives. I think it’s a great idea for the students in the ECE program to put together a portfolio around their graduation that they we can present it to prospective employers to showcase the skills that we have learned at Rasmussen. Obviously a degree from Rasmussen is evidence that we have the knowledge and skills, but a portfolio is a great way of presenting our individual and creative work. I think the three GAP skills are definitely skills all ECE professionals will need throughout their careers Communication: As child educators it is vital that we know how to communicate with our students, their families and our colleagues. It doesn’t matter what you know or how qualified you are, if you can’t communicate these ideas through writing and speaking they will never make any difference Critical Thinking: Being a successful child educator is all about creative problem solving, and that’s just what critical thinking is. As we learn early on, no child is a text book case, so being able to think on your feet and use creative problem solving will help us provide outstanding childcare to every child. Information Literacy: As early childcare educators we have to constantly stay up to date on the latest child care theory and techniques, our learning doesn’t end when we get our degrees. As such it is very important that we know what kind of information we need and where to get it. It is also vital to know how to use this information and give credit and cite sources.
Posted by Ashley Sturdevant on 6/2/2009 12:00:00 AM

Post a Comment

Name

Email

Message

Please enter text shown below: