As the technological landscape makes rapid improvements, it’s no surprise that the skills gap is becoming greater than ever. A skills gap is a mismatch between the skills an organization needs versus the skills that employees actually possess. This can include the technical skills required to perform their jobs, or soft skills like communication, critical thinking, and problem-solving.
Before an organization can bridge a skills gap, they must first catalog the skills their workforce has and skills they will need for continued success. A skills gap analysis identifies these current strengths and highlights which areas to target with retraining or hiring.
Is Your Company Struggling With A Skills Gap? Here Are the Signs
There is never a wrong time to perform a skills gap analysis—in fact, it could be considered routine maintenance to keep your business running smoothly. There are some signs that indicate when a skills gap analysis can be particularly beneficial to an organization.
- Filling open positions is difficult and takes too long
- Onboarding and training costs are abnormally high
- The organization struggles with performance or productivity
- Implementing technological advancements does not result in the expected improvements
- Innovation and creative thinking decline
- Employees are frustrated and disengaged, leading to higher turnover
The Benefits of Performing a Skills Gap Analysis
By analyzing and correcting a skills gap, an organization sets themselves up for success. When they prioritize the right support and developmental training for employees, businesses promote productivity, innovation, and agility.
Here are additional benefits of performing a skills gap analysis:
- Align training outcomes with organizational goals
- Identify the skills needed for the future
- Improve morale by supporting employees in career growth
- Identify the most impactful and cost-efficient training and development
- Support strategic workforce planning
- Improve recruiting and hiring
- Increase productivity and experience other long-term returns on training investments
Employees who feel valued and supported often reflect those qualities in their work, with higher performance and lower employee turnover. By building a skilled workforce through targeted development and training, organizations create reciprocated loyalty with their high performers.
How to Conduct a Skills Gap Analysis
Below are the key steps to performing a skills gap analysis.
1. Identify the Organization’s Goals
Start by identifying the scope of the skills gap analysis. It could target a single role (such as an open position), a team, or the entire organization. For example, if an internal team is about to implement a new software or hardware, performing a skills assessment and implementing training can help the team hit the ground running as they move forward with advancing technology.
2. List the Required Skills for Each Role and Team
Based on the project scope, create a list of desired technical and soft skills for the roles involved. This can be based on the skills valued by the organization, the skills required to perform a job, and the skills identified by job standards developed for technical roles. In fact, many technical skills assessments are created to measure against industry standards, which leads to the next step.
3. Assess Current Employee Skills Using Competency Assessments
Assessment tools, like competency-based skills tests from Nocti Business Solutions (NBS), can help employers identify the strengths and areas for improvement within their workforce. NBS uses industry standards and subject matter experts to identify relevant hard and soft skills for every industry. Our assessments undergo periodic review to ensure that the skills assessments keep pace with evolving technology. These assessments accurately and reliably measure workers’ skills against the skills needed to succeed in their particular role.
NBS competency tests come with comprehensive, intuitive results. An organization can clearly compare their employees to each other, as well as to nationwide averages to identify skills gaps in their workforce. These assessments are also excellent hiring tools to identify potential candidates who have the right skills for the job.
4. Compare Current vs. Required Skills to Identify Gaps
Using the results from the competency tests, compare the required skills against the skills of the workforce. Data should be presented in a way that makes it easy to identify trends. For example, is there a skills gap that affects the whole team? Would the whole organization benefit from retraining in a particular area? Do supervisors have the right skills to successfully guide their teams?
5. Create a Development Plan
Using the skills gaps, create a development plan to implement training where it will have the greatest impact. One meaningful way to add value to a role is to provide opportunities for industry certification or credentialing, like those provided by NBS. By participating in training and working to remediate any skills gaps, a certification can serve as proof of the employee’s effort and success.
For a deeper dive, read the related post: Three Ways to Close Your Skills Gap & Build a Skilled Workforce.
6. Measure Progress Towards Goal
One way to measure progress is to engage employees in another competency assessment after training, where follow-up test scores can provide a tangible measure of their progress in numeric terms. This before-and-after picture is a great way to show progress for an individual, a team, or the organization as a whole.
By conducting a skills gap analysis on a regular basis, an organization can perform a check-in on their team and support any areas that have opportunities for improvement with targeted training. With a regular cadence for analysis, the business can also measure progress towards addressing gaps in job skills and celebrate their employees’ efforts.
Best Practices for A Skills Gap Analysis
When performing a skills gap analysis, it’s important to make sure employees feel supported. Communication is key to helping the workforce understand that this is empowering them to be high-performers, and not a means of pitting employees against each other.
In addition, it’s important to provide this support regularly. Technology is evolving at a rapid pace, and by performing a regular skills gap analysis, businesses ensure they remain competitive and relevant.
Skills assessments, which are developed by subject matter experts and industry standards, are critical in determining useful and actionable insight. High-quality competency tests, developed by a third party, are the only way to obtain objective information. Assessments developed in-house may have unrecognized biases or conflicts of interest that make them an unreliable method of gathering skills data.
Lastly, don’t overlook soft skills—in fact, soft skills can be just as important as technical skills for many organizational skills gap analyses. Communication, interpersonal skills, critical thinking, problem-solving, negotiation, collaboration, and writing skills are all common skills gaps in the workplace. Skills assessments from NBS always include soft skills like those listed above, as well as ethics and legal responsibilities, work ethic, safety, and leadership skills.
To Discover and Address Your Organization’s Skills Gaps, Contact NBS Today
NBS creates skill assessments for all industries and all levels. Competency assessments can be used for new hires, entry-level employees, experienced workers, and advanced-level skills.
All NBS assessments go through a rigorous process to ensure they are reliable, fair, and legally defensible. They are based on industry standards, developed with a panel of subject matter experts and a psychometrician, with job and task analysis to ensure they are relevant and up-to-date with current technology. Assessments go through pilot testing and cut score development to help give employers actionable information about the skills of potential and current employees.
NOCTI Business Solutions specializes in developing customized tests tailored to your organization’s unique needs. We also offer a wide range of ready-to-use assessments – view the full list in our Assessment Index.
If you’re ready to start building a skilled workforce with NBS competency assessments, contact us here. NBS can help you identify the best way to reduce the skills gaps in your organization.
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