Gaps or differences always create problem weather in life, relationship, organization or skills. Inculcating the culture without differences and gaps always fosters. To excel professionally, what matters the most is to match and have the desired level of skills and if gaps found that must be bridged at earliest. Let’s check some more details here.

What is Skills Gap Analysis?

Skills gap analysis is a tool used by HR professionals to evaluate the difference or gap between the actual and future state of goal. Organizations need to identify the current skill set that an individual employee possesses but not necessarily can carry out a future job or to perform certain tasks effectively with the same skill sets. Hence, the skills gap analysis is a way to find out which skills and knowledge are lacking among the employees in the organization. Once this information is tapped, HR can address the skills gap in the organization and can plan accordingly.

Advantages of Conducting Skill Gap Analysis

• Identifies employee weak spots: People have both strengths and weaknesses. By performing a skill gap analysis, it can be identified where employees need additional training to upgrade the existing skill level.
• Growth & development: If an employee he/she is lacking a certain skill, they will usually not speak up, whereas they may know that they want additional training on certain skills and feel their company is not offering this training in such case, they start looking for a company who cares more about their career path. So it’s important to perform a skills gap analysis for employees. This will provide an overall development plan for each employee.
• Helps human resources: Performing a skill gap analysis helps your human resources department as it helps understanding what skills are needed for a certain role. This helps HR write well the customized job descriptions leading hiring of better candidates and ultimately stronger new team members.
• Nurture Career Growth: More growth always leads to a better future and great career prospects covering all the employees from all the levels. Analysing the gap and taking a next step forward always nurtures career growth.
• Increased productivity: Probably the foremost advantage of skill gap analysis is productivity will increase. Identifying the skills needed within training, in such case, the company becomes better at time management, work planning, and stays on project budgets more effectively. All these factors make the corporate stronger at fullest and better at achieving goals.

Methods to Identify Skill Gap Analysis

1. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): KPI or Key Performance Indicators offer measurable values that demonstrate how effective an organization is at achieving key business objectives. However, KPIs are often applied to employees to gauge how effective their job skills are at contributing.
2. Assessments: This way to help find skill gaps is with assessments. Using proper assessments where skills need to be added per employee and to an entire team.
3. Observations: No one likes to feel watched or like they are being micromanaged. But sometimes viewing how employees react within a given situation will help determining what skills are missing. Observations are a great way to determine skill gaps for employees because one can see what problems are at first-hand .
4. Review process: Employee review time is another good way to collect feedback for skills analysis. Instead of a one-sided review gathering feedback from any direct reports, their managers, and also their team member peers. This gives a better snapshot of strengths and weaknesses for each employee in terms of skills.

How to Perform Skills Gap Analysis?

Step 1. Chalking company objectives: Before beginning the analysis, chalking down the list of company or department objectives is must as objectives will determine what skills need to be gained by employees. Also, it will help prioritize what skills are most important to the company. This makes it easier to plan for training.

Step 2: Level for execution: Skills gap analysis can be performed at two levels:

• Individual
• Team/organization

Step 3: Identifying the essential skills: The skills required can be easily identified by answering the following questions:

• Which skills does the company value?
• Which skills do the manpower need to do their jobs both now and in the coming times?

Step 4: Measuring the current skills: To measure the skill level of  current employees with the skills identified as being most important. Measures like KPI, observations, MBO’s, reviews, assessment etc leads forward for the next step.

Step 5: Taking action: There are two ways in which the skill gaps can be filled either with training or with hiring. Therefore, based upon the need of time HR needs to determine which approach works best for the specific skill gap.

• Training: Most companies train their employees to fill vacant positions. The perfect training helps in bridging the gap between the present and the desired skill levels.

• Hiring: If training cannot reduce the skills or required talent gap, an organization can consider hiring new employees with the knowledge and skills they are looking for.

I hope you got an idea of what is the skill gap analysis. Comment down below if you have any queries or suggestions related to the above article.