Discover Your Organization's Skill Gaps: A 5-Step Guide

We've talked about how it's becoming more difficult by the year to get the right talent in the door, train them, then keep them. As an HR or business leader, you should be performing a skills gap analysis on your organization.

Think of it as a SWOT analysis of your company's human capital situation.

Identifying the areas where organizations need to bolster their skills is an important step in any talent strategy. In this guide, we’ll be showing you five simple steps to performing a skills gap analysis, helping your business become more competitive in the talent marketplace.

Why Do A Skills Gap Analysis?

The benefits of doing a skill gap analysis include:

  1. Strategic workforce planning - Allows you to better allocate your resources to the right areas to achieve company objectives in terms of hiring and recruiting

  2. Optimize your training programs - New hires are never ready out of the box. A strong training program is to helping employees reach their peak productivity

  3. Staying ahead of the curve - The future of work is here, and burying your head in the sand when it comes to picking up new skills is a recipe for becoming obsolete

Get Multiple Perspectives When It Comes To Planning

Almost every how-to article starts with the generic “identify company objectives” step. but you probably already know what your goals are, right?

Once you figure out the organizational goals, you ask yourself what skillsets your teams need to get there. You then create jobs to fill those skillsets and voila - you’re ready to recruit and train for the future!

Unfortunately, that doesn’t factor in another important perspective: the employees.

SEE ALSO: Why Employees Leave Managers, Not Companies (AKA why you should always listen to your people!)

The biggest mistake we see talent teams when planning their analysis is the failure to do it at two levels. If you ask your C-level and team leads what skills are missing, they might say one thing.

However, the individual associates and front-line employees may have a very different answer. They usually differ in age, demographic and most importantly, perspective. 

Group These Skill(sets)

Once you ask everyone where the skills gaps in your organization are, it’s time to aggregate them into one centralized skills taxonomy. It’s going to be messy, but there’s no way around the need to organize these skills into your individual business units. 

Have the leaders of each business unit to work with HR and group these skills. You can group your skills in any number of ways, but we recommend:

  • By Job Function: A Tech Support rep and a Customer Service rep may work in completely different departments, offices and job titles. However, it’s likely that they have overlapping skillsets

  • By Department: A UX designer and a marketer on the consumer team may perform different tasks, but they probably need some of the same soft skills to work in the same department

Identify Your Employee’s Existing Skills

Although we have incredible technology (ex. HRIS, ATS) and information (ex. Resumes, LinkedIn profiles) on our peoples’ skills, it’s very hard to predict their performance within a given role.

So, either one of two things are happening: people’s career histories are useless, or HR professionals aren’t writing the correct job descriptions. 

This would explain why the Harvard Business Review has said the following…

“Businesses have never done as much hiring as they do today. They’ve never spent as much money doing it. And they’ve never done a worse job of it.” - Peter Cappelli

Long story short: identifying your people’s skills is difficult. No, it’s not because they’re lying on their resume (although from what we’ve seen, people could be more self-aware about their Microsoft Office skills!). 

So, while collecting data from your people on their skills is a necessary evil, do your due diligence. Make sure to assess them through performance reviews, evaluate their certificates and observe them while they work.

Of course, we can’t talk about the future of work without mentioning technology, machine learning and AI...

Understand the Difference Between Actual Vs. Perceived Skill Gaps

We now know, at the very minimum, a few things about your organization:

  1. The skills your company needs

  2. The skills you (think) your people possessed

It’s simple math. Skills needed - skills possessed = skills gap! Right?

However, there are a few things you may not have considered. As we’ve said above, people aren’t the greatest at judging other people’s capabilities, which begs the question...is the equation above really true?

We were never that good at math growing up, either. But at Paddle HR, we do understand people, and we understand that there’s a difference between how people perceive their abilities versus their actual abilities...or potential. 

We recommend “adjusting” the skill gaps you find based on unrealized human potential. 

For example, let’s say Company XYZ needs 1,000 salespeople. Let’s say at Company XYZ, the three most important traits a salesperson can have are:

  • Good product knowledge

  • Active listening and communication

  • Time management

If Company XYZ only has 700 people with these skills, it stands to reason that they need to hire 300 people with these skills, correct? 

Not necessarily. Before pouring what promises to be an almost infinite sum of resources hiring 300 salespeople, Company XYZ needs to look around its existing workforce and see if there are people who already have these skills or the potential to learn these skills.

Looking at the above, one thing becomes obvious: those three skills are not exclusive to salespeople. You can find those skills in marketers, product managers and others. Look for employees that have had prior experience in sales-related roles such as working in restaurants or retail.

Yes, there are other key skills involved, such as objection handling, that are needed. But we promise you that a lot of times, training an employee for one or two missing skills is a lot easier you think.

Closing The Skill Gaps

There are three ways to close the skill gaps within an organization:

  1. Buy: Going out and recruiting or poaching employees from other companies. Expensive? Yes. Worth it. Sometimes? The only solution? Absolutely not.

  2. Build: Training your employees who’ve been identified as having the potential to fill other roles. 

  3. Partner: As opposed to hiring one person, why not hire a team for a fraction of the price? Partnering includes hiring agencies, dev shops and more to fill specific, niche areas of your business needs.

Once you identify your skills gaps, choosing how to close them largely depends on resourcing and your infrastructure. For example, if you have a great internal training program and solid work culture, but not a ton of budget to spend on recruiters, “Build” is easily the best option for your business.

For many companies we work with, that’s not the reality - there’s simply too much that goes into a solid learning and development program. The technology that measures and predicts the right skills for individual workers is out there, but difficult to develop and get right. 

If that’s a need to identify skill gaps within your organization, then we recommend the “Partner” route.

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