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The way we work is changing. AI is transforming industries, remote work is the new norm and the skills your employees need are evolving faster than ever.
The future is already here, and your organization needs to catch up.
As corporate leaders, you know the old ways of working are no longer enough. In fact, a recent Springboard survey revealed 70% of companies report a skills gap in their workforce, with 40% even saying it has worsened over the last year.
To succeed, your team needs to master a fresh set of hard and soft skills. But how do you know where to focus your training efforts? The answer: a skills gap analysis.
In this post, we’ll show you how to conduct a skills gap analysis properly so you can invest in the right training programs and keep your workforce ahead of the curve. You’ll also find templates to help you plan for and analyze skills gaps across the board.
A skills gap is the difference between the skills an employee has and the skills they need to stay competitive or do their job well. Skills gaps can lead to lower productivity, missed opportunities and even slower company growth.
For example, a social media manager who's a pro at crafting engaging posts but hasn't yet mastered TikTok may struggle to connect with younger audiences and miss out on a huge opportunity to boost brand awareness.
Skills gaps can show up in different ways, like when an employee lacks technical know-how or has trouble with soft skills like communication or leadership. They can occur due to various reasons, from rapid tech advancements to changing job requirements to inadequate training.
To stay competitive and successful in the long run, companies need to find, analyze and fix these gaps. This is where a skills gap analysis can help.
A skills gap analysis looks at the current skills of your workforce and compares them to the skills they need to meet your business goals (i.e. desired skills.)
This strategic process helps you pinpoint areas where your employees might be missing key knowledge, skills or abilities to do their jobs effectively. A thorough analysis lets you spot specific skill shortages or ‘gaps,’ whether they're related to technical expertise or people skills.
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The insights you gain from this analysis can help you set training goals, create targeted training programs, hire stronger talent and improve your strategic workforce planning. We’ll discuss more advantages of conducting skills gap analyses in the next section.
A skills gap analysis can help your business in more than one way. Here are some specific benefits of conducting regular skills gap analyses in your organization:
Conducting a skills gap analysis is a multi-step process that requires various tools and documents for brainstorming, planning, execution, and analysis. Here are some skills gap analysis templates you might find useful along the way to speed up your project.
This skills gap analysis template is an excellent tool for trainers, managers and leaders to track skill levels and plan development initiatives across teams. It features high-resolution images, creative text and vibrant colors that you can completely customize to fit your brand.
This template offers separate sections for individual and team gaps and solutions, which makes it easy to identify key points of the analysis at a glance. There’s also a section for an expectations vs. reality view of the key skills in your team or organization.
Make this skills gap analysis template even more engaging with Visme’s data visualization tools and interactive elements.
This department skills gap analysis template is a presentation you can customize for your own company use. It has sections to outline your main objective, key goals, methodology, tools, skill categories as well as separate slides for documenting technical and soft skills.
The template features customizable flowcharts, bullets and tables to clearly illustrate department-wide skills gaps. Level up your presentation by applying brand colors, embedding videos, adding interactive charts and connecting real-time data in Visme.
This skills mapping plan template helps you visualize the skill levels of your employees, which makes it easier to compare current skills with desired skills and offer recommendations for tailored training programs.
Customize the sections of this template to personalize it, such as writing down your objectives in detail, elaborating on your methodologies and highlighting key recommendations. Then, tweak the design with Visme's icon finder. Swap star ratings with any other icon from Visme’s built-in library, or add numbers, progress bars and other widgets instead.
IT teams will appreciate this skills gap whiteboard template, which uses a matrix format to help you organize the severity of skills gaps and prioritize training efforts. It’s designed by professionals to help you grab attention and communicate effectively.
This template is perfect for tech leads and managers looking to identify and address skill deficiencies in their departments. Use Visme's collaboration tools to allow team members to input data directly and keep things up-to-date.
This skills gap fit analysis template is a whiteboard that lets you match skills to roles or even individual employee. It’s ideal for HR planning and strategic workforce development, and you can customize it to fit your brand and vision.
Use Visme’s built-in characters to replace the placeholder images or upload your own photos and assets to personalize this template. You can also add more pages, rows, columns and sections to this whiteboard, and work collaboratively with your team to brainstorm and plan.
This skills gap analysis template helps you plan your project and summarize objectives, findings and other details in one place. It’s a strategic tool that allows you to visualize and share information like key roles, scope and more.
The template is designed with animated icons that you can easily replace or customize. You can also add links to the actual analysis and action plan in the designated areas in the template, making the whole experience fully interactive.
Now, on to the meaty part. Follow the steps below to conduct a thorough skills gap analysis that can help you pinpoint needs and focus your training efforts where they’re most impactful.
Before you start collecting data, do your homework and create a detailed plan.
What are your objectives for conducting a skills gap analysis? How do they align with your bigger company goals?
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Then, decide on what type of skills gap analysis you want to go for. It’s typically done on one of these three levels:
You also need to be mindful of the following when planning for your skills gap analysis:
We recommend creating a project plan document to pen it all down, share with your employees and keep everyone on the same page. It’s also a good way to keep track of your progress and ensure you don’t lose sight of your goals.
Use this project management workbook to create an organized plan for your skills gap analysis. Feel free to customize any element and add, remove or duplicate sections as you see fit.
The next step is to figure out exactly what skills your team needs to crush your business goals. In other words, you need to make a list of ‘desired skills’ so you can compare them to your employees’ current skills and evaluate any gaps.
Study each role in your company in detail and jot down the skills needed to succeed in that position. Don't just focus on the skills they need today, but also think about what they'll need in the future. To make it easier, break these skills down into different categories:
Don't just rely on your own knowledge here. Tap into the expertise of industry thought leaders and even interview your own senior leadership team. Ask them:
Visme’s collaboration tools can help you collect all these insights remotely. Have multiple stakeholders input their answers on a brainstorming whiteboard, such as the one below:
Once you've got a solid list of skills, it's time to make it visual. Use this mind map template from Visme to create an eye-catching infographic representing the desired skills for each role.
Mind maps are perfect for breaking down complex information into digestible chunks. Plus, they're easy to share with your colleagues and get everyone on the same page.
Now that you know what skills your team needs, it's time to figure out where they stand today. You'll want to create a detailed profile of each employee's current skill set. Here are a few methods to collect this data:
Use a variety of methods to get a clear picture of each employee's capabilities. Finally, don't forget to keep track of all this information in a centralized system or database so you can easily analyze and reference it later. You can use a training matrix or skills matrix to help after training to keep organized.
Now it's time to make sense of all the data you collected. This is where you'll identify the gaps between where your employees are now and where you need them to be. Here’s a breakdown of how to properly organize and analyze skills gap data:
You can also use Visme's data visualization tools to create charts and graphs that highlight the areas where skills are lacking. Seeing the data in a visual format makes it much easier to spot patterns and prioritize where you need to focus your efforts.
For example, you might create a bar graph that shows the percentage of employees who are proficient in each skill on your list. Or you could make an interactive map that color-codes skills based on the severity of the gap.
Here’s an example of how to prioritize skills needed by employees, teams and companies.
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At this stage, you know where the skills gaps are. You just need to figure out how to close them. This is where a solid action plan comes in. Start by prioritizing which gaps to tackle first—focus on the ones that will have the biggest impact on your business goals.
To do this, rank the gaps based on two factors:
Once you've identified your top priorities, outline the specific strategies you'll use to bridge those gaps. This could include:
Outline exactly what you'll do, who will be responsible and what resources you'll need. Use Visme to put together an attractive one-pager, presentation or infographic that lays out your implementation plan in a clear, visually engaging way.
Here’s a skill-based employee development plan template you can customize:
Create engaging learning materials and visual aids for your training, mentoring and coaching programs with Visme. Customize templates with a few clicks and integrate your projects seamlessly with your preferred LMS with SCORM and xAPI export.
If you’re planning to hire new employees that are a better fit for your organization, you can also create infographics, onboarding presentations, employee handbooks and training manuals with Visme to get them up to speed.
You’ve conducted your skills gap analysis, but the work doesn't stop there. Make sure you're actually moving the needle by continuously monitoring and evaluating your progress.
Set up regular check-ins and status reports throughout the analysis to keep the project on track. Use Visme’s project status report templates for this purpose:
Next, define the metrics you'll use to evaluate training impact and measure success. This should include both quantitative and qualitative data, such as:
Use Visme’s feedback forms and surveys to collect qualitative insights, thoughts and opinions from employees, customers and stakeholders.
Finally, don't forget to track the ROI of your training programs. How are improvements in skills translating into business results like increased profit and revenue growth?
Use Visme to create engaging reports that showcase your progress through data visualizations, links, video embeds and other interactive elements.
Imagine your marketing team is struggling to generate leads, and you discover they’re not using the latest social media strategies. This is a classic skills gap—the team lacks the necessary skills to succeed in their role. By identifying this gap, you’re able to take the necessary steps to fix it, such as providing training or hiring new talent.
A skills gap analysis typically includes the following components:
Some of the best tools for conducting a skills gap analysis include:
Follow the steps below to create a skills gap analysis template:
Conducting a skills gap analysis might sound like a big deal—and it is—but it doesn’t have to be complicated or difficult. In fact, if you use the right tools, you’ll be wondering why you didn’t do it sooner.
Visme is the perfect partner for training and development teams— tap into hundreds of professional templates, including for skills gap analyses, and use advanced features like collaboration, interactivity, online sharing, AI design tools, and SCORM and xAPI export.
Our platform makes it easy to analyze training needs, develop personalized training programs, track progress and take employee productivity and business growth to new heights.
Ready to find out for yourself? Sign up for a free account and take it for a test drive.
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