Most skills gaps aren’t self-evident—after all, you wouldn’t let things get to the point where it’s obvious that your organization lacks the skills to get things done! Nevertheless, there are gaps in your skills coverage that you must pre-empt and identify before they become a problem that can only be filled by a costly wave of fresh hires. That’s where skills gap analysis comes in. In this article, we consider why it’s important to assess your workforce’s skills, your different options for gap analysis, and the role your software and your learning platform specifically can play.
Why It’s Important to Assess Skills
The HR Research Institute’s Future of Upskilling and Employee Learning 2024 report, a wide-ranging, survey-led white paper sponsored by Bridge, found that 76% of individuals in top leadership roles considered upskilling to be within their organization’s top 10 priorities. In fact, 36% placed it within their top three priorities. However, regardless of this relatively high prioritization, when asked whether their organization assessed employees’ needs and gaps in skills or knowledge, just 47% of all respondents agreed.
How can an organization focus on upskilling its people when it doesn’t yet understand what skills people already have? Your guess is as good as ours! Even allowing for the high likelihood that an individual hired into a certain role will have the skills in their job description, what of the myriad of other knowledge they may have outside that? Most individuals have skills beyond those considered necessary at the time of their hiring, and most will subsequently acquire new skills via their work, their learning and development activity, and in their day-to-day lives.
Having a full and up-to-date understanding of your skills landscape has several benefits:
- Refines your hiring and recruitment approach: Knowing which skills are necessary for a role and which skills are missing in your organization will help you build better job postings and decide which of your candidates is strongest.
- Helps you properly understand the strengths of individual employees: You’ll gain an understanding of whether your most skilled individuals are in roles that make those skills available during day-to-day operations. This may help you move people to where they would be happiest and most effective.
- Sets the agenda for learning and development: Hiring and lateral moves both help to close gaps, but your organization’s skills landscape can also be reshaped through your L&D efforts. A skills gap analysis can help your L&D team set training that addresses gaps. It can also help employees understand the skills they need to acquire in order to advance.
- Provides critical information necessary for planning: The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs 2023 report included an estimate that 44% of workers’ skills will be disrupted in the next five years. It’s essential for organizations to forecast the skills they need in the future and in order to plan for those skills, they must understand those they already have.
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How to Identify Skills Gaps
Step 1) Determine the Focus of an Analysis
A skills gap analysis will typically be performed reactively on one of two main levels:
- A role-specific analysis concerning the skills required for a given job and whether individuals currently have the necessary skills for that position. Such reviews are usually the responsibility of a line manager and may be the result of change in duties or poor performance.
- A broader, project-based analysis focused on whether your employees have the skills required for an upcoming project or other business challenge such as the arrival of new technology, or an ongoing failure to meet business goals. Such analyses are more likely to involve an organization’s HR function or even external consultancy.
The more analyzes you conduct, the more complete a picture you’ll gain of your overall skills landscape. It’s also desirable to move beyond purely reactive analyses, especially if you intend to use them to steer L&D, inform your planning, and continue adjusting your hiring activity. Therefore, consider revisiting your analyses annually once established—much of the groundwork will be in place, with only minor adjustments required as roles gradually shift.
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Step 2) Assemble Data to Establish the Skills Required
In order to discover a gap, you need to define the skills demanded by the role, project, or business challenge. This information can be drawn from a number of different sources, including:
- Your existing documentation about required skills. Job descriptions and any previous skills gap analyses you’ve previously run may be a starting point, but remember that this exercise is partly about challenging your established skills expectations. HR records such as exit interviews and performance evaluations may help you uncover skills that are not yet accounted for.
- Externally published taxonomies from industry associations, research organizations, or even peer organizations.
- Subject matter expertise from inside and outside your organization. Consult senior leaders and managers and ask them to define the skills they value and the skills they believe employees need to do their jobs now and in the future. You should also consider perspectives from outside the business—you could even seek out and interview industry experts and executives for their opinions.
As you assemble this list of skills, it’s important to consider how they stack up relative to each other. Some skills are more essential than others, and ranking them could help hiring managers decide between two similarly qualified candidates, or help L&D prioritize its training programs.
Step 3) Evaluate Your Organization’s Current Skills
With your skill requirements defined, it’s time to see how your employees, your teams, and/or your organization stacks up against them. Assess existing skills via:
- Integrating the requirements into your performance review feedback cycle
- Conducting tests designed to evaluate specific skills
- Staging interviews with employees to discuss the required skills
- Conducting self-assessment surveys
- Holding workshops with a skill-gauging component
You’re looking to assess not only whether these skills are available to you, but how advanced they are versus the requirement, so it’s best to assess on a scale. Once you’ve collected these scores, it should be relatively straightforward to see where your current capabilities fail to measure up to your requirements.
Congratulations, you’ve found your skill gaps!
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How Bridge LMS Can Help You Assess Your Training Needs
Though we’ve described skills gap analysis as a three-step process, it has the potential to be time-consuming to implement and scale. Even small organizations would consider doing the legwork of creating a skills taxonomy and subsequent evaluation for every role in their business a fairly substantial lift. In larger organizations, with hundreds and possibly thousands of different roles (and a complex array of wider business challenges that may require analysis), the process may be prohibitively time-consuming.
The 47% figure we mentioned at the beginning of this article is less of a surprise in light of this. And even for those who do assess employee skills gaps, they’d be forgiven for achieving a less than comprehensive view. Indeed, if you’re doing some skills gap analysis, it’s possible to be lured into a false sense of security. But other, undetected gaps may still exist. Thankfully, skills management software like Bridge can help you gain a more complete understanding of your gaps.
Bridge will give your organization access to a library of over 32,000 skills from Lightcast, a leader in labor market data. Using this data, Bridge will identify the skills that an employee should have based on their job title. In addition, employees can take an active part in their professional development by identifying the skills they want to develop. Once skills are identified, Bridge LMS will assign learning recommendations. Managers and employees can also request start/stop/continue and skills feedback for a well-rounded view of development.
Get a Holistic View of Skills In Your Organization With Bridge
See how Bridge LMS can help you keep employees engaged and invested in their growth with our learning and skill development platform. Take a Self-Guided Tour of Bridge Skills.
