Home Welcome Login

The Geospatial Online Professional Assessment Tool, or GOPAT, is an advanced tool developed by the nationally renowned Workplace Learning and Performance Center at the University of Southern Mississippi, under the direction of Cyndi Gaudet, Ph.D. 

Funded by a grant from NASA and involving a multi-year research project that included input from hundreds of GIS educators, employers, and public and private geospatial professionals, GOPAT can be used by . . . 
  • Organizations to better articulate the kinds of skills needed for geospatial technologists when recruiting and selecting future employees
  • Individuals to understand and assess the roles and competencies that should be targeted for personal career development

The issues GOPAT is designed to help resolve include . . .

  • The shortfall of professionals and trained specialists who can utilize geospatial technologies in their jobs
  • The creation of universally accepted standards for the geospatial workforce
  • The advancement of worker training and retraining

GOPAT has advanced analysis tools for . . .

  • Employee recruitment and selection
  • Performance management
  • Career development
  • Curriculum frameworks for training and education

GOPAT is available as a self-assessment or can be used by an employer for individual or group evaluation. In the latter capacity, GOPAT reveals everything from areas of interest for career advancement to job performance to educational needs. 

Employers can use the results of GOPAT to create a roadmap for professional and organizational growth that is essential for their success and competitiveness. GOPAT facilitates this by . . .

  • Yielding a person’s dominant roles in their job
  • Providing a gap analysis of critical knowledge for a particular work role
  • Prescribing additional training and education for identified gaps

So how does GOPAT work? A user answers a series of questions by identifying key job deliverables for their current or future job. 

GOPAT interprets key deliverables, called outputs, to determine dominant work roles needed by a specific person or for a particular job. 

GOPAT also requires the user to assess their current level of expertise for specific competencies linked to the outputs. 

Finally, GOPAT produces a gap analysis of current skill levels and needed skill levels to be successful on the job. Thirty-nine competencies and 138 outputs are included in the GOPAT analysis. 

By generating a worksheet for career development based on the results of the assessment . . . 

  • Employers can use GOPAT for performance management

  • Geospatial professionals have a tool to manage their own career development 

GOPAT provides an online mechanism to evaluate existing workplace roles, outputs, and competencies for potential or existing geospatial professionals. It can be used for . . .
  • Corporate- and self-assessment
  • Identification of training needs and workplace requirements
  • Charting of career paths and lattices
In short, there is no other GIS personal and corporate assessment tool available that has been developed with as much academic and professional research and input or that provides as many highly usable outputs and useful analyses.