What is a skills gap analysis?
A skills gap analysis is an evaluative tool used to find skills and knowledge gaps in individual employees, teams and your whole organization. You can analyze these gaps to identify training, development, hiring or other strategy needs to help your teams perform effectively.
HR departments or departmental managers are generally responsible for performing skills gap analysis across employees and departments. Skills gaps analyses should be conducted regularly, particularly when:
- Your business is missing targets or goals
- You’ve changed your business’ strategy
- Employee turnover is high
- Your business has adopted new technology
Related: Identifying the Best Leadership Qualities of a Manager
For example, a marketing team manager conducts meetings with their team to identify skills gaps and set KPIs for the next quarter. Next quarter involves an increased focus on a growing social media platform, which means the marketing team needs strong social strategy and content skills. A skills gap analysis shows that the team lacks in these areas, so the marketing team manager can consider options such as social media training or hiring a social media specialist.
Benefits of conducting a skills gap analysis
Performing a skills gap analysis can help you tremendously. Consider some benefits of using this tool:
- Build effective strategies: A skills gap analysis can help you anticipate future business needs and create a strategic plan for your short- and long-term business goals
- Identify and fix gaps: Gain an understanding of how your employees perform and your organization’s strengths and weaknesses as a whole
- Recruiting and hiring plans: A skills gap analysis can help you plan for recruitment by proactively seeking new employees with specific abilities
- Increasing productivity: Once you know what skills your employees lack, you can provide appropriate training to help them improve their productivity.
- Gaining a competitive edge: Your competition may face similar skills gaps, so addressing these deficiencies can give you a competitive edge in the market
- Customized training and development: Optimize your training and professional development budget by personalizing training plans to address employees’ specific skill gaps
- Improving retention: Employees are often more loyal to their organization when they have the skills to perform in their role and their employer is committed to their development
- Protecting your organization: Identifying and resolving skills gaps can protect your organization from major disruptions to your productivity and profitability
Steps to conduct a skills gap analysis
To perform a skills gap analysis, follow these steps:
1. Make a plan
In most cases, companies perform both individual and departmental skills gap analyses. Enlist the help of team leads, department heads and other managers to help administer any tests or questionnaires you might use and provide observational insight and feedback.
2. Assess trends and business needs
Consider your business’ growth to determine what skills your employees may or may not need to support your business’ goals, and assess your industry’s and market’s trajectory. Staying ahead of developing trends can help ensure you’re providing your employees with the appropriate training to remain relevant and effective in the future.
3. Establish necessary skills
Using your organizational goals and market trends, determine the skills your employees need to accomplish your goals and maintain a competitive edge. Rank necessary skills by importance so you know where to prioritize training, development and hiring. For instance, you might place high importance on your marketing team’s social media content strategies but lower importance on email marketing automation.
4. Measure current skills
Assess your employees’ current skill set with a combination of these methods:
- Review an individual employee ’s Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
- Administer skill assessments and survey to all your employees
- Interview employees
- Solicit feedback from managerial staff
- Perform feedback reviews with employees
5. Identify gaps and training needs
Once you measure your employees’ skills, you can reference your necessary and prioritized skills to identify skill and knowledge gaps. Depending on how you want to address the deficiencies, list skill gaps by employee, team, department or organization.
Related: 3 Training Plan Templates to Develop Your Employees
Skills gap analysis template example
Conducting skills gap analyses can be tedious and time-consuming, but templates can standardize and streamline the process. Most skills gap analyses are calculated using a templated table or spreadsheet software with consistent and comparable data. You can create templates for a variety of standardized processes, including analysis for post-training new hires, remote employees, managers and more.
Review the examples of skills gap analyses below to create your own skills gap analysis template:
Skills gap analysis: marketing
This example skills gap analysis table shows skills relevant to Employee A, a marketing associate:
| Pat Markson | No skill | Limited | Proficient | Above average | Exceptional |
| Data analysis | 1 | ||||
| Writing | 1 | ||||
| SEO | 1 | ||||
| Social media | 1 | ||||
| Technological knowledge | 1 | ||||
| Flexibility | 1 | ||||
| Awareness | 1 | ||||
| Empathy | 1 | ||||
| Teamwork | 1 | ||||
| Interest | 1 |
Skills gap analysis: sales
This example skills gap analysis table shows skills relevant to a regional sales team:
| Sales team A | No skill | Limited | Proficient | Above average | Exceptional |
| Number skills | 1 | ||||
| Active listening | 1 | ||||
| Communication | 1 | ||||
| Relationship building | 1 | ||||
| Organization | 1 | ||||
| Persuasion | 1 | ||||
| Flexibility | 1 | ||||
| Resilience | 1 | ||||
| Public speaking | 1 | ||||
| Time management | 1 |
Using skills gap analysis data
Use the data from your skills gap analysis to determine which strategies can help you reach organizational goals, meet industry markers or prepare for potential changes to your company’s specific field or marketplace. Review these steps to help you effectively use the data you gather:
Training and development
Many companies train and develop employees internally to help them meet the demands of their current role or reskill them for another. Offering the right training to individuals and teams can help you close gaps you find in your analysis. Consider that group training options may be more suitable if your team consistently lacks important skills, but personalized training may be better for individuals falling behind their peers in specific areas.
Some training and development options include:
- In-house training modules
- Workshops
- Seminars
- Training events and conferences
- Certification programs
- Employee mentorship programs
- Online courses and educational material
Related: Cross-Training Staff: What It Is and How to Do It
Job redesign
Skills gap analysis can sometimes show that tasks and responsibilities may need to be redistributed to redesigned roles. Redesigning jobs can help emphasize employees’ strengths and result in reskilling employees with new skill sets.
Hiring initiatives
When employees retire or move to other organizations or roles, skills gaps may be too broad to resolve with training and development initiatives. This means you’ll have to recruit new talent that meets your skills and knowledge needs. Consider implementing screening measures for certain skills in the application process, such as assessments and tests.
Track and follow-up
Make skills gap analyses a regular part of your business strategy. Conduct these assessments when employees complete a training initiative, you bring on a new hire or wherever else it’s valuable to gauge employee performance.
Check in with your employees and management team throughout training to understand which training methods are more or less effective. Allow employees with substantial improvement to work autonomously for several months and review their KPIs and productivity numbers to see if their performance has improved. For those who still showed deficiencies in the follow-up skills gap assessment, consider additional training.
Read more: Employee Training Evaluation: Tools and Best Practices
FAQs about skills gap analysis
What is the difference between SWOT and skills gap analysis?
Both SWOT and skills gap analysis are assessments that provide insight into your business’ performance, but they work in different ways. A skills gap analysis targets specific areas of opportunity in employee skills and knowledge, but a SWOT analysis considers your business’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and external threats.
What causes skill gaps?
Many factors can contribute to skills gaps in your business. Two main causes of skills gaps are retiring employees and insufficient soft skills development. With technology rapidly progressing, inadequate formal technology training also contributes to skills gaps.
How does a skills gap affect employers?
Some jobs may remain vacant indefinitely without candidates who meet business skill needs, and your teams may not be equipped to handle their tasks. These factors can reduce your business’ overall productivity, efficiency and bottom line.
Skills Gap Analysis for Managers Templates for PDF & Word
Download these skill gap analysis templates to help you identify strengths and gaps in your employees’ skills to determine training opportunities.
*Indeed provides these examples as a courtesy to users of this site. Please note that we are not your HR or legal adviser, and none of these documents reflect current labor or employment regulations.
