Opportunity Gap Analysis Workshop
Opportunity Gap Analysis Workshop
The Career Technical Education Opportunity Gap Analysis (OGA) initiative provides training, resources and support to help state leaders identify and address gaps in access to high-quality CTE.
NEW FOR 2025
Train-the-Trainer: Opportunity Gap Analysis Work-Based Learning Workshop
In recent years, work-based learning (WBL) has grown exponentially as an educational focus across the country with an expanded interest in providing access to hands-on work experiences for all learners, a vital element to ensuring real-world, skill-based outcomes in programming. Advance CTE wanted to build upon the success of the Opportunity Gap Analysis workshop to empower state Career Technical Education (CTE) leaders to cultivate data literacy through maximizing collection, analysis, and use of data in identifying gaps and improving learner outcomes in WBL programs.
The Opportunity Gap Analysis: Work-based Learning initiative consists of several stages of professional development: two half-day workshops delivered by Advance CTE; ongoing technical assistance including a community of practice and individual coaching; and access to a suite of tools including a dashboard template, workbook, facilitation guide, practical strategies for addressing specific opportunity gaps within WBL programs and more. Through this support, participants not only develop technical data literacy skills, but also work to define WBL in their state, establish the continuum learners will follow through the education system, and explore common practices associated with WBL accountability system and reporting. State leaders are empowered to not only use these tools themselves, but to train other state and local CTE leaders to utilize strategies and tools gained in their own institutions through a train-the-trainer model.
This new tool is part of a suite of tools, resources, and training opportunities developed by Advance CTE to support the field at every stage of their journey to ensure all learners have access to high-quality CTE programs and limitless opportunities.
This initiative is generously supported by the Joyce Foundation.
Train-the-Trainer: Opportunity Gap Analysis Workshop
Achieving Advance CTE’s commitment to fostering a culture of actionable, transparent and trustworthy data in every state requires state Career Technical Education (CTE) leaders to cultivate data literacy to maximize collection, analysis and use of data to identify gaps and improve learner outcomes.
The Opportunity Gap Analysis initiative consists of several stages of professional development: two half-day workshops delivered by Advance CTE; ongoing technical assistance including a community of practice and individual coaching; and access to a suite of tools including a dashboard template, workbook, facilitation guide, practical strategies for addressing specific opportunity gaps and more. Through this support, participants not only develop technical data literacy skills, but also a mindset of closing access gaps to apply to all analysis of CTE program design and delivery. State leaders are empowered to not only use these tools themselves, but to train other state and local CTE leaders to utilize strategies and tools gained in their own institutions through a train-the-trainer model.
This tool is part of a series of workshops developed by Advance CTE to support the field at every stage of their journey to ensure all learners have access to high-quality CTE programs and limitless opportunities.
This initiative is generously supported by the Joyce Foundation.
Since Fall 2021, Advance CTE has supported six cohorts encompassing 39 states and U.S. territories and almost 400 CTE leaders in learning about and using the Opportunity Gap Analysis Tool. Follow-up surveys show over half of the state CTE leaders participating have incorporated the data and root cause analysis processes from the training into policies and practices on conducting a Comprehensive Local Needs Assessment (CLNA). Additionally, 73 percent of the state CTE leaders participating have incorporated the use of the list of practical strategies into processes to mitigate or transform systems to expand access to CTE programming.
