What is a Skills Gap Analysis and How to Identify Skill Gaps in the Workplace

Ensuring your team is equipped with the right skills is a top priority among HR and L&D teams. In fact, according to our recent survey of industry professionals, reskilling and upskilling ranked as the second highest priority for 2025, after leadership development. And for enterprises with 20,000+ employees, it’s the #1 priority. 

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A skill gap analysis is an excellent place to start when planning your reskilling and upskilling initiatives. It helps you spot the gaps between teams’ current abilities and what they need in order to achieve your organization’s goals. By conducting a skills gap analysis, you don’t just uncover training opportunities; you also set the groundwork for smarter talent management and a future-ready workforce.

But what is a skill gap analysis and how do you do it? In this post, get actionable instructions on how to conduct your own skill gap analysis and what to do with your findings.

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What is a skill gap analysis?

A skills gap analysis is a strategic tool used to assess the difference between where employee skills are at and where they need to be to meet job requirements and your overall organizational goals. It’s like holding up a mirror to your organization’s capabilities, reflecting both strengths and areas in need of development.

Why is a skills gap analysis important?

A skills gap analysis provides a clear, actionable roadmap for HR and L&D to shape targeted training programs and strategic hiring plans. By understanding these gaps, you can start building up your workforce to meet future challenges with ease.

How to identify skill gaps in the workplace

Let’s get into how to actually conduct a skills gap analysis. This process isn’t just about identifying what’s missing; it’s about understanding how to bridge those gaps and unlock your team’s potential. As we go through the steps, think of a skill gap analysis as a journey where you’re not only collecting data but also brainstorming solutions. Here’s how to identify skills gaps in the workplace:

1. Identify the skills needed

Start by spelling out the key skills needed for every role in your organization. This means understanding the roles in different departments to deduce what the core skills are and which skills will be needed in the future. This part of the skills gap analysis is all about getting on the same page.

Here are a handful of ways to complete this process:

• Consult with team leaders: Have conversations with managers and team leaders to understand the essential skills needed for their departments. The insights they can provide offer a practical perspective on what skills are actually used day-to-day and what they foresee will be needed in the future.
• Review job descriptions: Take a deep dive into job descriptions to make sure they include all the relevant skills. Adjust the descriptions to include any new skills to align with changing industry standards and organizational goals.
• Analyze industry trends: Research industry publications, attend conferences, and/or talk to subject matter experts to stay up to date on emerging skills and technologies. This will help you forecast future skill needs.
• Learn from competitors: Keep an eye on competitor job postings to see what skills and roles they’re prioritizing to help support the other information you’ve gathered.
• Consider technological advancements: Technology is constantly changing, so be sure to understand how that affects the skills needed by your team, such as learning new platforms and tools, coding languages, or regulatory compliance requirements.

2. Assess current employee skills

The next step in understanding how to identify skill gaps is to take a good look at the skills your team currently has and create a detailed skill inventory. Dive into this by gathering information through self-assessments, peer reviews, and performance evaluations. 

Here are some ways to assess your employees’ current skills and build your inventory:

• Use self-assessments: Send out self-assessments to encourage employees to evaluate their own skills, helping them reflect on their capabilities and recognize areas for growth.
• Facilitate peer reviews: Use a peer review system where colleagues can anonymously assess each other’s skills and areas for improvement. This can shed light on valuable insights on how teams work together and how their skills complement each other.
• Use 360-degree feedback: Also known as “multi-source feedback”, this system helps you gather skill competency information from teammates, managers, and colleagues in other departments to give you a fuller picture.
• Leverage tech: Training software or a Learning Management System (LMS) can help track employee development and regularly assess skills so you have historical data to pull from.

3. Analyze the data

Once you’ve gathered all the information you need, it’s time to dive into analyzing the findings of your skills gap analysis. Keep an eye out for patterns or discrepancies between what your team can do now and what you’ll need in the future.

Here’s how you can conduct the actual analysis part of your skills gap analysis:

• Identify key metrics: From the gathered information, choose which qualitative and quantitative metrics are most important to the skillsets you’re looking at. These could include project completions, error rates, customer satisfaction scores, or gathering common themes across your feedback sources.
• Segment the data: Break down your collected data into smaller chunks based on department, role, or individual employee to better understand specific trends or areas of concern.
• Compare and contrast: If you have access to it, compare current data to past data or other industry benchmarks to help you better identify trends or gaps.
• Develop your hypotheses: Pull your conclusions from the data and decide which need further exploration and help you prioritize which gaps to work on first.
• Use data visualization: Part of using your skill gap analysis is convincing company leadership to take action. Preparing and presenting your findings in a visual and easily understood way can be a huge help.

What next? How to use your skills gap analysis

So you’ve completed your skill gap analysis. Congrats! Next, it’s time to put all your hard work into practice. Here’s an overview of how you can use the information uncovered in your skills gap analysis to fuel upskilling initiatives.

1. Develop personalized learning

Using your skill gap analysis data, start crafting personalized learning plans that target skill gaps for identified groups of employees or individuals, such as digital literacy skills or new industry or regulatory compliance requirements. This could include online courses, SME-led seminars, a mentoring program, or hands-on training sessions tailored for specific skills.

👉 We have a few handy resources on personalizing skill development, such as using AI in learning and development and encouraging employee-led development.

2. Monitor progress

The metrics you outlined in your skills gap analysis will help you identify milestones and track the progress of your employees through regular manager check-ins or using an LMS to automatically measure progress over time as employees learn. Open up multiple ways for employees, managers, and company leadership to provide feedback on the program so you can adjust if needed.

3. Build a future-ready workforce

Encourage a culture of long term learning and adaptability. Give employees the tools and resources they need to develop the skills they find valuable in their role and that contribute to the organization’s overall goals. This could be providing access to course catalogs or encouraging peer learning.

Put your skills gap analysis into action

A skills gap analysis is a key strategic tool to help your organization stay competitive and agile in a fast-changing world. By gaining a better understanding of where your workforce is at and where they need to go skillswise, you can help drive meaningful growth.

Leveraging Together’s suite of mentorship software, peer mentoring, and employee engagement tools can help you and empower your employees to address the skill gaps in your organization. With your skill gap analysis data in-hand, Together takes on the heavy lifting when creating mentorship programs, coaching initiatives, and peer mentor programs to target specific skills. With our Events tool, organizing SME-led skills workshops and seminars is a snap. With highly customizable and scalable tools, we can help you ensure your team is engaged and ready to learn new skills and take on new challenges.

Learn how Together can help your organization close skill gaps and become future-ready—book a demo today!