Spotting Skills Gaps: What They Are And Why They Matter

Most companies and organizations know they have skills gaps. 75% of CEOs say that lacking skills are the biggest impediment to growth. They’re also a key concern for employee development, and for managers trying to boost employee performance.

But identifying and remedying gaps is a challenge. It takes time and energy to survey your teams and uncover missing skills. It can be both a distraction and a hindrance.

The alternative is top-down, where a few managers nominate the core skills to develop. But this is neither collaborative nor comprehensive. It’s just too subjective.

And yet, identifying skills gaps is important. Today, skills-based learning is the best way to upskill and reskill your teams.

This article explores what skills gaps are and why they matter. Then we examine the classic ways to find skills gaps, slow as this process can be.

eBook Release

2024 State Of Online Learning Report

What do we need to do to address skills gaps at scale and prove that we have done so with our piece of the huge global L&D spend?

Download the eBook

Finally, you’ll see the best way to repeatedly spot skills gaps in real time, deliver the right training to close them, and future-proof your business against evolving a skills shortage.

What Is A Skills Gap?

A skills gap is the difference between the knowledge and competencies an employee or team has, and those that they need to perform at the required skill level as a valuable member of a successful company.

This includes:

• Hard skills. For developers, this might be a coding language or certification with a certain software. In sales, it might mean knowledge and experience with CRMs or a cold email strategy.
• Soft skills. These most often include interpersonal communication, giving feedback, and adapting to change. Negotiation and conflict resolution are other good examples.
• Proprietary skills. This is the institutional knowledge and know-how built up over time in the organization, which can’t be acquired anywhere else.

It’s perfectly natural to have specific skills gaps in one or all three of the above areas. New joiners lack proprietary skills by definition, and even your long-serving workforce needs upskilling as your products and services evolve.

Skills gaps exist at the individual as well as the team or organizational level. Employees themselves may lack the abilities to do certain functions, or may need more industry knowledge to perform well.

And the company itself may have skills gaps. An obvious example is trying to develop an iPhone app with no iOS developers on staff.

But this applies to soft skills too. A growing company needs new managers to negotiate contracts or conduct candidate interviews, but not have any internal resources to teach them.

Skills gaps almost certainly exist in every role, at every level, in every department. That’s normal, but you mustn’t allow gaps to grow.

Why Identifying Skills Gaps Is Essential

Diagnosing a weakness is the first step to overcoming it. You can’t help your teams improve if you don’t know what needs improving. This then informs your overall learning and development (L&D) strategy and gives you a base to grow from.

Unfortunately, too many L&D programs don’t start here. Instead, most take a topic-based approach to L&D, believing that with enough content, some of it must surely be relevant.

But that’s more hope than reality.

Carefully Identifying Current Skills Gaps:

• Helps the company spot current and future issues, including talent and knowledge shortages.
• Gives employees a clear career progression path with next steps.
• Ensures team members are being evaluated fairly, with real reference points in their performance reviews.
• Keeps the company focused on continuous improvement.
• Creates a more adaptable, future-proofed culture.

There’s also value in spotting skills gaps but choosing not to invest in upskilling around them—at least for now. Perhaps they’re not urgent, or the impact of certain employee skills gaps isn’t as crucial as others identified. It’s ok to not address all skills gaps simultaneously.

How To Identify Skills Gaps In The Workplace

The standard approach to identifying skills gaps is not particularly revolutionary. It also tends to be slow, overwhelming (especially at Enterprise level) and leave a great big ‘what now?’ at the end. But this doesn’t have to be the case, as we’ll see shortly.

The typical steps to finding skills gaps include:

• Surveying team members and managers in particular.
• Employee skills assessments
• Using KPIs and company metrics to spot areas of opportunity or poor performance.
• External benchmarks and industry best practices
• Conducting skills gap analyses or a skills audit at the individual and team level

This list isn’t exhaustive, but any honest effort to find skills shortages in a business should include them.

Even doing the bare minimum, it’s often seen as overwhelming and too time consuming to try. Organizations may already have spent up to five years mapping critical skills, only for their maps to be out of date by the time they’re published. That’s a very real issue.

As Director of People and Culture at 365 Retail Markets, Brandon Caldwell explains, “I’ve sat on calls with a team of L&D professionals, SMEs and executives for hours and days on end, trying to define what seems like a simple premise: what does a person in this particular role need to do, and what are the right skills they need to have to do it? It’s an excruciatingly long exercise and can take months to get to a working draft of the skills a person needs to have in one role.”

But advances in AI-powered tools now mean that time and effort are no longer limiting factors. You can now identify and address skills gaps with remarkable efficiency.

How AI Helps You Identify And Map Skills Gaps

Generative AI has already had a profound impact on much of the business landscape. And while AI use is not yet widespread across the L&D world, it’s only a matter of time. Organizations are now creating safe and secure environments for their teams to incorporate it into their day-to-day. And reaping the enormous benefits.

Generative AI and automation have a few very clear uses related to skills gaps:

• The tools can automatically (and instantly) identify the most likely skills gaps based on your roles, team experience, tenure, and plenty of other factors.
• AI will map these skills shortages to staff at the individual level. This means no more manual skills mapping, and you can have skills training much more tailored to real people rather than job descriptions.
• AI tools can analyze and update skills gaps in real time, so you’re always up to date.
• The tools incorporate your proprietary knowledge and documentation just as easily as industry best practices. So even when using the same LMS system as other companies around you, your training and learning content will be all your own.

All of this takes what would otherwise be a long process and executes it in record time. And crucially, your source of truth for skills never goes out of date. This is a dynamic, collaborative approach based on regular input and feedback from your teams.

And in Learning and Development, collaboration is critical.

Download the 2024 State Of Online Learning Report today to gather valuable insights that can help you bridge gaps and launch more meaningful L&D initiatives.

360Learning

360Learning is the learning platform powered by collaborative learning. Upskill from within and accelerate internal mobility across the entire employee experience, starting with onboarding.

Originally published at 360learning.com.