Education Plans

Every new year we get a chance to review our past accomplishments and plan for the year’s next challenges. Hopefully as part of your planning you include some time to improve your genealogical skills and awareness. Genealogical Education Plans are a great way to organize this time.

Whether you are a novice or advanced genealogical researcher, we all must continue to learn new skills and techniques, or to keep abreast of recent advances in DNA research and testing or new the availability of new online records. Developing education plans are useful tools to focus your skill-building goals as well as plot a course to successfully achieving these goals. These plans do not need to be overly complex. They should be tailored to your needs, budget, and time. After all, we need to make sure we allocate time to doing the research!

Your education plan is just that — yours. You can make its a simple as you want or as robust as you desire. The basic components are:

• Skill, Learning, and Resource Assessments
• Goals and Objectives
• General Skills Improvement
• Readings
• Courses
• Conferences

This is the first of two articles and covers the assessments and goals components.

Skill, Learning, and Resource Assessments

Your education plan should start with an assessment of your current research and writing skills. Not sure what skills you use or need. Consider the following areas¹:

• Searching Records
• Organizing Records
• Source Citation
• Evidence Analysis
• Writing Conclusions
• Family History Writing
• Photo Preservation and Restoration
• Specific software tools (e.g. Roots Magic, Family Tree Maker)

This is not an exhaustive list and rather broad. You can pick subsets of any one of these topics to focus your needs. Look at these and decide: What are you good at? What do you need to improve upon? Let’s take a moment to write these down. Make two columns on a piece of paper and list your strengths in one column and your weaknesses in the other. Once you have your lists, decide which ones you want to work on this year. As a word of caution, don’t go overboard and take on too much. It’s better to pick one or two and work on mastering these skills than to spread yourself too thin. Ultimately this will led to frustration. Trust me on this. It never ends well.

The next area to consider is how do learn. Some individuals grasp the most technical information after just reading a few documents. While others require an instructor to explain the concepts in an engaging dialogue. Furthermore, this can vary based on the subject and concept. Take some time think back to your years in school. Which instructional format did you flourish? Most of our training and education can be grouped into these categories:

• General Skills Improvement
• Reading
• Courses
  • Instructor Led
  • Self Study
  • Group or Peer Centric
• Conferences and Workshops

Each of these are discussed in greater detail in our next article along with links to several resources to help get you started.

Goals and Objectives

Call to Action

1. Adapted from the Genealogical Proof Standard and the Board of Certified Genealogists ↩︎