5 Steps to Uncover Employee’s Skill Gaps

Viren Kapadia May 24, 2021
5 Steps to Uncover Employee’s Skill Gaps

What is Skill Gap Analysis?

As the name suggests, Skill Gap Analysis is a significant gap between the skills needed to be implemented in an organization and the current skill sets of its workforce. There comes a moment when the organization realizes that unless some necessary skills are learned, it will face competition in the market. Hence, these skills become the key to unlock the highest potential of the employees of the organization.

Importance of evaluating the skill gaps:

There are many benefits to skill gap analysis. Some of them are:

  • Skill analysis helps to analyze the capabilities of the organization's employees and their basic needs.
  • It also helps to analyze their existing skills and lets the leader know if employees can learn some new skills through workshops. It also provides information to the leaders if they need to hire new employees with different skill sets.
  • Skill analysis gives the organization an idea of what kind of training or workshop is required first and where they need to spend the time and money.

Five steps to unfold the skill gaps in an organization:

  • Planning the analysis:

    The first step towards the evaluation of skill gap analysis is to identify the skills.

    First, you must make a note of the specific skills your company currently needs and compare them with the skills your employees already have.

    The comparison between these two skill sets is the derived skill gap. The skills listed on the first list are the necessary ones for the organization's present situation. But if they are not listed on the second list, then it will determine the skill gap that you need to resolve soon.

    To plan your skill gap analysis, you must make a list of persons to talk to. This list may include executives from the team lead, C-Suite, and staff-level employees. You need to ask questions and research about the skills the employees possess already, based on different departments. Then you need to discuss with the team leaders who can assist you in addressing the skill gaps of each employee in their projects and groups from different departments.

  • Tracing the future work trends:

    With the research for determining what you need to do right now to take the organization to its highest potential; you also need to give importance to the future of work trends. It might be something relevant to automation technology or machine learning or data analysis or something exclusive to the recent trends.

    For this purpose, you need to analyze and define the organizational goals for the future. You may ask this question: What do you wish your organization’s position to be in the next five years? You must ask yourself more questions related to the work industry and plans. Try these questions:

    • With the existing workforce, how can we implement the essential strategies to get the organization towards a better future?
    • What skillsets do our employees need to become smarter and more effective?
    • What are the business areas that we presently lack our knowledge in?
    • What skill sets must the employees learn for future trends?

    Once you get the proper answers to these questions, they will help you to know where the organization needs to focus eight now. It will also provide a clear scenario to figure out what skills you will need from employees to achieve the goals.

  • Researching on the necessary skills required in the future:

    Irrespective of the industry, every organization must learn cutting-edge technologies and adopt new practices to achieve progress and sustain itself the competition.

    But it is also important to be kept in mind that the work should be parallel to the rapidly expanding industry. In today's world, organizations are experiencing new development strategies that make it difficult to continually find and recruit employees with precise skill sets to work with these new technologies.

    To run against time and be responsive each time a new skills gap sprouts in the team or a skill gap is determined in the workplace, you need to implement the skills gap analysis to identify the gaps. Then, based on the research and analyzing the future goals, you need to determine the current situation of your industry. Then, you need to implement the required skills to attain your business goals.

  • Employees need to be efficient and self-taught:

    To establish a well-reformed organization and a group of skilled employees, you need to think beyond the box. Going beyond providing conventional workshops to expertise in specific skills, you'll need to cultivate the desire to thrive better with acquiring more knowledge in the field. An innovative and friendly environment will help in developing a learning culture that will further encourage the employees to be trained on their own. As a result, they will be updated with all the necessary information.

    This strategy involves a thoughtful approach. This could be done by providing employees with the appropriate learning tools, well-researched content, and new opportunities that they need to implement in their work fields.

    Also, the organization can use promotions, work hour flexibility, and other rewards as means to motivate the employees towards self-learning and improve their skills.

  • 5. Growing the habit of continuous learning:

    At first, you need to provide all the available resources and opportunities to offer the employees a quality learning experience. Then, you need to start monitoring the employees and their performance levels. Providing study resources and creating a valuable learning program is not enough. After the learning period is over, you need to keep an eye to evaluate their potential.

    You can offer dashboards so the project leaders can have easy access to the results and draw important insights that will further help them to make an assessment based on the recent performance.

    You can use analytics to track the metrics and analyze where to work more to take the performance one level higher.

    You need to continue the learning process as this is important to stay active at the skill development programs. You can boost the motivation by creating new opportunities to discuss the skills already learned or about new skills to be learned.

    It always needs to be kept in mind that learning is an ongoing process. So the employees should be careful about the recent trends and gather knowledge in every aspect.

    GyrusAim helps in bridging the skill gaps and provides a quality learning experience. At Gyrus, you will be offered some excellent opportunities like:

    • Providing a solution to completely automate your training and development function
    • Filling compliance and skill gaps
    • Getting real-time actionable insights into your workforce's learning
    • Elimination of learning bottlenecks
    • Providing a consumer-grade learning experience to your employees
    • Switching to a modern, more efficient, and cost-effective LMS
    • Consolidation to multiple learning programs under one LMS

    Identifying the skill gaps plays an important role in building effective communication and helps in the increase of production. Companies can organize skill development programs to make their employees aware of new skills that are much needed in the industry and relevant to the era. This will help them to build new leadership strategies, and this way, the organization will excel in the industry in bounds and leaps.