How to Carry Out a Skills Gap Analysis

Skills Gap Analysis Overview

If you are wondering how to carry out a skills gap analysis, this article will provide you with the generic stages and criteria. Completing a skills gap analysis is a key business function that is applicable to all business types and industries. The starting point is to identify what skills your business is required to perform. This means reviewing functions, process and the activities carried out to meet industry standards and regulations.

Armed with the information of which skills are needed to completed certain functions or comply with regulations, you can then start assessing the existing skills of each employee. The end result will give you a comparative list of the skills needed versus the skills you already have, hence the title – a skills gap analysis.

Skills Gap Analysis Objectives

Completing a skills gap analysis is a key business function that enables you to identify what skills the company needs to operate and review them against existing employee skills and those that are missing. Once a business understands where and what the skills gaps are, they can identify, assess and schedule training or suitable actions to cover the needs and fill the gaps.

A skills gap analysis process should document what aims and objectives the company hopes to achieve by completing the assessment. Some of these will differ based on business type and industry, but can include: –

• To comply with regulations, rules, and industry standards where skills gap analysis is a requirement.
• To document the skills needed within the business and required by each employee to carry out their work effectively.
• To support employee knowledge, training and continued professional development.
• To assess the existing skills of each employee and department to ascertain the current level of skill set and knowledge base.
• To effectively source adequate training, systems, and tools to gain and maintain the required skills and fill the identified gaps.
• To provide accountability and timeframes for training requirements and skills to be achieved.
• To obtain valuable management information on the required, existing and missing skills within the business.
• To produce mandatory records of skills gap assessments and analysis when requested by regulators and/or governing bodies.
• To ensure all employees have the skills, knowledge and training required to complete their duties and perform their role within the Company.
• To provide customers with the best products and services and to ensure that the employees they deal with are knowledgeable and suitable for the role.

Skills Gap Analysis Assessment Stages

• STAGE 1 – REVIEW – Review the Company, its services, products, activities and goals to establish an overview with the aim of identifying the skills needed to meet business and industry objectives.
• STAGE 2 – IDENTIFY – Identification of the skills required to meet the objectives from stage 1. This should include setting the scope, priority and requirement of each skill.
• STAGE 3 – ASSESS – Utilise both employee and department gap analysis templates to identify the existing skills and skill level attributed to each employee, department or business section
• STAGE 4 – ANALYSE – Analysing the data obtained from stage 3 and comparing it with the required skills from stage 2 gives the skills gap analysis information.
• STAGE 5 – ACTIONS – Define and implement actions and training to fill the identified skills gaps.
• STAGE 6 – MONITOR – Completing a Skills Gap Analysis can be an annual function but is also best practice where business goals or objectives are not being met, poor performance, non-compliance and when new systems, products or services are being introduced.

Skills Gap Analysis Template

The team at Know Your Compliance Limited have been providing regulatory templates for more than 10 years and are proud to have over 8500 organisations using our templates. If you don’t want to start from scratch and want an easy, straightforward option for buying a Skills Gap Analysis Template, then look no further. Our pack comes with a user-friendly Excel template for recording and assessing skills gap analysis informaiotn, along with employee skills forms and skills gap analysis procedures.