By determining which Xilinx course offering is most appropriate, you can maximize your learning time and minimize training costs.

Xilinx Education Services offers a variety of instructor-led courses, e-Learning modules, and curriculum paths for your design specialty to help you increase your skill set and create efficient designs. The diversity of courses and delivery methods empowers you with the flexibility to choose the learning method that best meets your needs and preferred learning style.

But with so many training options, how do you determine which courses will enhance your present design capabilities? Take a Xilinx skills assessment.

Available at no charge, Xilinx skills assessments measure your current training knowledge and identify skills in need of improvement. The results of your analysis can give you a better understanding of your abilities and help you make wiser registration decisions as to which courses or modules best fulfill the gaps identified.

“Efficiency is the name of the game these days as companies strive to lower costs and maximize their investments,” said Patrice Anderson, course development manager at Xilinx Education Services. “When you take a Xilinx skills assessment, you lower your training costs and maximize the return on your training investment by taking only the courses you need. By completing a skills assessment, you are able to develop a personalized learning plan that will get you on the fast track to implementing Xilinx solutions.”

Knowledge Drives Effective Learning
With your personalized learning plan, you can enroll only in the Xilinx courses that are right for you. Xilinx courses will show you how to reduce time to knowledge, boost system clock speeds, fit more functionality into smaller devices, shorten design cycles, maximize productivity, and increase your skill set.

Jahan Lotfi, a design engineer at Cortina Systems™, uses skills assessments to prepare for class. “I always believed that once you ‘know the things you don’t know,’ and then sit in the class, you pay more attention than when you are just presented new material,” Lotfi said. “I think sometimes you just don’t know the significance of the material presented to you until you have thought about it a bit and analyzed its advantages.

“As a result of taking the skills assessment, I was a better student and came out of the class more informed.”

Plan for Lowest Cost Training
Although engineers can use skills assessments to organize a learning strategy for themselves, their managers are also finding skills assessments a helpful planning tool.

When manager Don Meyerhoff of Standard Microsystems™ needed a resource to help plan the training budget for his staff, he turned to Xilinx Education Services Representative Mike Weir for assistance. Weir pointed Meyerhoff to skills assessments.

“We used to team up the customer with a Xilinx instructor on the phone to determine the customer’s skill level, or we emailed the course syllabus or pointed the customer to the online course description,” Weir said. “But now we can offer a much more effective solution.”

By asking his engineers to take online skills assessments, Meyerhoff can gauge which skill levels they’re at and ultimately, which courses are or aren’t necessary. As a result, his training budget is more precise.

Beyond helping you choose appropriate single courses or online modules, managers can use skills assessments to help them budget the appropriate amount of training credits included in Xilinx Productivity Advantage (XPA) agreements. The XPA Solution includes education, support services, software, and IP cores in one comprehensive package. Training credits are included in every XPA and can be redeemed toward any Xilinx Education Services offering.

To help determine an adequate number of training credits, managers can ask their engineers to complete skills assessments to determine which courses they should take going forward, and thus how many training credits to include.

Completing an assessment also provides the basis for a qualified training plan ¨C one that can be tailored to individual companies based on their needs.

The Skills Assessment Advantage
To determine your current Xilinx design skill level, simply go to https://xilinx.onsaba.net/xilinx. Select the skills assessments respective to the courses for which you want to assess your competence. Of course, there is no obligation to register for any course, and you can skip the assessment and register for a course without it. But you can also test your skills as often as you like to help better determine whether you would benefit from attending a course.

Xilinx also recommends that you reassess your skills after completing a course, comparing your post-course score with your pre-course score. Lotfi believes that taking the skills assessment again some time after completing an FPGA course helped him discover new tool design capabilities.

"The [skills assessment] showed me that there were some tool capabilities I didn't know about because I had not come to need them in previous designs," he said. "I found these [tool capabilities] from the [skills assessment] questions."

Most of the skills assessments include matching, multiple choice, and fill-in-the-blank exercises and take about five to 15 minutes to complete (for a sample question, see Figure 1). A score of 80 percent or higher implies you are familiar with at least 80 percent of the course content and would not benefit significantly from taking the course. On the other hand, if you are unable to answer at least four out of every five questions correctly, you should attend the class to increase your individual productivity. Ultimately, the decision is yours.

Your score is also yours. Only you have access to your skills assessment results. To view your score, simply use your username and password when logging in to the Learning Catalog.

Conclusion
Efficiency goes beyond design. It begins with effective training and plays an important role in meeting budget constraints and tight delivery schedules. With up-to-date FPGA design skills, you are in a better position to maximize your investment in Xilinx solutions and reduce your time to market. Now you can make the most of your learning time and training investment with Xilinx skills assessments. Enroll only in the training you need to get the skills and knowledge that will bring your design to market fast.

For more information about Xilinx skills assessments, visit https://xilinx.onsaba.net/xilinx, or contact the Xilinx Education Services registrar via e-mail at registrar@xilinx.com or by telephone at (877) XLX-CLAS (2627). For a list of frequently asked questions, go to www.xilinx.com/support/training/skills-assessment.htm.

To learn more about the Xilinx Productivity Advantage Program, visit www.xilinx.com/xpa, or contact an XPA representative at (800) 888-FPGA (3742) or e-mail fpga@xilinx.com.

Xilinx Global Services Finishes Faster As a manager, the skills assessment can help you: Assess your engineers' Xilinx-related design skills Maximize your training investment Empower your engineers to develop a personalized learning plan Order the number of training credits (TCs) your staff will use in a given term Plan an effective XPA agreement. As a design engineer, the skills assessment can help you: Determine which course is right for you Save money and time by taking only the right training for you Assess learning gaps on specific Xilinx products Measure your pre-course and post-course knowledge Develop a personalized learning plan. Skills assessments are available for the following courses*: Fundamentals of FPGA Design Designing for Performance Advanced FPGA Implementation Designing with Multi-Gigabit Serial I/O Introduction to VHDL Introduction to Verilog. * Additional skills assessments will be added over time. Please visit https://xilinx.onsaba.net/xilinx for current course offerings.

Printable PDF version of this article with graphics.  (12/11/03) 195 KB