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Concerned about your skills gaps?
You should be! 37% of leaders said their gaps got worse in the past year.
And most are worried because they don’t actually know three key things.
1. Which skills they need.
2. Which skills they have.
3. Where those gaps exist. And which they should close first.
A skills gap analysis needs to answer these - that’s it.
You’ll see a lot of guides with a lot of guff, but we’re sharing the three-step framework with you below.
You’re welcome! Good luck with your skills gap analysis.
Organisations tell us this takes way too long!
Normally nine to 12 months for a lot of companies.
And it’s because most people try to map skills manually, using individual interviews, trying to build a skills taxonomy from scratch, and using spreadsheet to collate it all - which normally ends up gathering dust.
Using HowNow AI, we analyse real-time market data - looking at live job adverts to understand the tasks and responsibilities associated with each role.
This allows us to infer the skills and proficiency required for someone to operate that role and the associated tasks.
Now we have a core skills taxonomy for the jobs that are available in the market. And the goal is to contextualise that based on jobs that exist within your organisation.
By integrating with your HR system, we can look at the roles in your company, the positions people have previously had, and what the core responsibilities are - which gives us much-needed context for the skills needed.
Now we are mapping skills using data! Not deciding which skills are need in our subjective opinion or falling foul to any biases we might have.
Congratulations, you’re benchmarking against the wider market, but bringing in the context from within your organisation - the perfect formula.
So, we understand the skills we need and the levels of proficiency required.
Now we have to measure the skills we currently have and to which extent.
This allows us to identify gaps, and we can do this part of our skills gap analysis in three steps too:
Don’t do this:
In the same way we approach skills mapping, we can’t just interview everyone in the business. We want to be smarter and more efficient, so that we can do it at speed and scale.
Do this:
Find and leverage the data that already exists in the business.
What do you know about someone on a personal level? What’s their work history? Have they been learning and what has that looked like? Have they made knowledge contributions in the business?
We can use this to infer the skills they have, and it’s also something we use HowNow AI to do at speed and scale.
You should also try to use productivity and performance data, which also allows us to be more objective when measuring skills.
If our target customer satisfaction is 8 out of 10 in an NPS, and we’ve got someone who consistently hits 10, we can make an educated assumption about their skills. The same applies to people who consistently fall below that standard.
Don’t do this:
The classic move of using time-consuming tests and exams, where we assume skills level based on performance in those scenarios.
Do this:
Leverage 360-degree assessments that combine our own review of our performance and the insights of our peers and managers.
This allows you to pull together an individual’s reflection on their own skill set and the insights of people who see their application of that skill in practice.
At HowNow, we use the Dreyfus Model of Skill Acquisition - measuring proficiency on a five-point scale from Novice to Expert.
We then use AI to combine that with performance data and project outcomes, so that we can answer questions like:
Did this person complete that project on time? And did they complete it to a high degree?
When you integrate with the systems that contain performance data, you can make data-driven decisions about someone’s proficiency - removing subjectivity from your skills gap analysis.
Don’t do this:
Try to close every single gap at once! Not all skill gaps are created equally…
Do this:
We have to ensure we are objective here, especially as we analyse data and establish our skills gap. Remember, our goal isn’t to try and solve the skills gap at this stage.
So we need to look for obvious and concerning gaps.
That brings us nicely to the third step in our skills gap analysis: prioritising which gaps to target and close.
It’s highly likely that you’ll spot a good number of skill gaps.
More than you can close at once, which means we have to rank and prioritise them in order of the impact they’ll have.
We want to get buy-in! So, we need to target the gaps that have the highest return on our time and solve a challenge that benefits either the business or the most people in the business.
Moving through the stages of the framework below helps you do this.
People managers are crucial to this process too, as you’re relying on their insights as you prioritise.
Our end of the bargain is to arm them with the data we’ve collected so that they can have better conversations and prioritise skills that have impact.
As a business, we have this strategy and these goals that we need to reach.
Do we have the skills needed for that?
If the answer is no, we have to prioritise these gaps.
This is where the manager has to work out which skills matter in relation to an individual’s performance.
And if they don’t believe they have them, we have to prioritise those.
On a personal level, what does that employee believe is important to them?
Which skills do they believe they need to perform their role and support those wider goals?
We also need to ask ourselves if there are skills we need in our team that nobody has.
Ultimately, we’ll also have goals and targets as a team, so the skills we lack as a group become a key priority if they are a blocker.
We’ll dive into how we track trending and emerging skills later, but this is something you should consider.
Especially in terms of our future aspirations as companies and individuals! Which skills will we need to remain relevant, competitive and able to perform or seize opportunities.
38% of leaders say their company's skills gap got worse in the last year, and that number's only going one way... 🆙☝️📈⤴️
Our new playbook gives you the tools to close skills gaps and make L&D a key driver of your organisation's success.
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