Most of the organizations struggle to find an adequate workforce that satisfactorily fills the required skillset.
As per a report by the Open University, more than 97% of organizations in the STEM sector and 96% of financial organizations have struggled to fill in the skill gap in the last year in the UK. Further another finding by the Open University Business Barometer reported that skills shortage in the UK has worsened over the past few years.
However, the skill gaps also mean opportunity in high-tech professional roles.
What is the Skill Gap Analysis?
Skills gap analysis helps the companies to recognize and streamline the skills it needs to match its business objectives. It also helps to understand the needs and tailor the employee development and skills programs as they need.
Why is the Skill Gap Analysis Needed?
In all the organizations, for every role and responsibility, there is a knowledge gap and skills redundancy. Organizations must find out the gaps in the recruitment cycle. Without proper analysis, organizations may not be able to fill the gap and understand their hiring needs. The training of staff needs to be done to efficiently create a workforce, which can bring positive results to the organization.
It gives a complete overview of the organization’s health and its latent skill set.
The Skills Gap Analysis is a way to gauge the current talent pool of the organization and create programs that fix it readily.
Steps of Skill Gap Analysis
- Planning
The gap analysis of skills needs to be done at the individual as well as organization level.
The HR teams should plan the skill gap analysis by consulting the managers and decision-makers. It is advisable to have professional agencies conduct skill gap analysis within the department and at the individual level. The gap analysis should be planned strategically in a phased manner. You can also hire a professional recruitment agency to conduct the skills gap analysis for the company.
- Identifying the Skills Needed for the Organization
The organizations need to do a thorough review of the current talent pool and then understand what skills it needs to supersede their competitors. Hiring is a complex process that can turn unrealistic and unfruitful if there is a gap in the skills that an organization needs and the abilities which the workforce entails.
Skill identification needs to be done at two levels.
1) What is the skillset the employee needs to fulfill their role, and how can they perform up to the best of their capabilities?
2) What are the skills which the organization and teams within need to create a competitive and thriving work culture?
For these organizations, their HR teams can do surveys, do a review of the company’s ethics and its vision for the future. The skill identification needs to be farsighted and acquainted with the industry peers.
- Measure your Skills
Performance reviews, surveys, interviews, and assessments are a great way to scale the current skill set of the employees and teams in the organization. There are various skill management tools available these days that help to strategize and quantify the skill levels of the employees.
Measuring the current skillset helps the HR teams to plan the future course of action. The training and future hiring strategies can be designed based on the results.
- Find out where the Gaps are
After the company has identified the differences in the skills and needs, the next step is to churn down to the possible areas and departments where the skill gap is prominent. Supposedly, the teams identify that the employees need to work on the communication skills and interpersonal skills in the Customer Relationship Department.
- Acting on the Gaps
After the gap is identified, the organization needs to work on the findings. So in the above case, to fill the communication skills gap, the HR department can train the current employee base and also hire new employees who are already efficient communicators.
Training and learning programs can be created for the executives in the department.
- Training can be done both online and classroom pieces of training
- Encouraging employees to attend webinars, conferences and complete certifications
- Mandating skill upgrade programs in the appraisal cycle
- Conduct events and in-house competitions
Hiring new employees having the required skills is a fast track way to fill the gap. The organization can create screening tests and interview processes to identify whether the candidate has the required capability or not.
Conclusion
The bottom line is that the findings of the skill gap analysis should be prudently manifested to bring about positive change and growth of an organization. Further, timely conduct of such analysis will help you prevent any unwanted surprise of having unskilled resources on board. For more information on professional and in-depth skill gap analysis, you can contact us.
