How to Conduct Skill Gap Analysis in 2024 for Better Performance

In today’s hyper-competitive business landscape, the key to sustained success lies in a workforce that is equipped with the right skills. 

However, identifying and addressing skill deficiencies within your team can feel like navigating a complex puzzle. 

That is where skill gap analysis becomes your roadmap. According to recent research, nearly 75% of global employers struggle to fill key positions due to lacking qualified candidates.

This statistic underscores the importance of skill gap analysis and through this guide, we’ll discuss what it is, offering actionable strategies, & steps to conduct a skill gap analysis quiz.

What is the Skill Gap Analysis?

A skill gap analysis is a process that is conducted to identify the gap between the required skills by a company and the current skills possessed by an employee.

A skill gap for instance can be an organization where the marketing team is tasked with new digital ad campaign but they struggle with using latest online ad platforms like Google Ads.

While they are skilled in traditional marketing method, they don’t have the required expertise to optimize digital ad spend and target the right audience effectively.

This difference between their current skills and those needed for the digital campaign can hamper the company’s ability to organize effective digital campaigns and optimize marketing strategies.

However, by identifying this gap, the company can provide targeted training or hire a digital marketing specialist to ensure the campaign’s success.

Running skill gap analysis through a quiz/survey will help ensure setting the right priorities and focusing on the wins that can solve workforce challenges.

Aside from that, it will help ensure that viewing the business from a skills point of view becomes part of your company toolbox.

Advantages of Using a Skill Gap Analysis

1. Identify potential areas for improvement

A skills gap analysis helps you in determine employee skills and knowledge and potential gaps at every level.

It will focus on creating the right training and development and investing in the right mentorship software that employees require in your workforce to perform their jobs effectively.

2. Culture of continuous learning and development

When you conduct a skills gap analysis, you put an effort into finding out the areas for improvements in your employees.

It leads to create a culture that focuses on development and learning through various learning pathways.

This shows them additional skills they need for their current role and highlights skills they might need for future growth and promotion in their professions.

3. Gain the competitive advantage

When you understand and work towards your workforce’s weaknesses and strengths and help employees towards their growth and development, then you get ahead of the curve in your industry.

4. A better workforce planning

Strategic workforce planning is about deciding the right people to hire, with the right skills, in the right role, among other things.

But for that, you need to know what are the right skills for your workforce and the goals of your organization. And skills gap analysis shows you in which key positions you lack the core competencies.

It also pushes you to identify your goals and define future skills benchmarks.

Effective Strategies for Conducting Skill Gap Analysis

A skills gap analysis may appear straightforward, but it requires careful planning and attention lies in the detail. Here are six steps that you can follow.

1. Effectively plan your analysis

A proper and thorough skill gap analysis requires assessing skills at both individual and team levels.

To plan your analysis effectively, you need to engage with individuals, including C-suite, team leads, or managers to identify the skills gaps of individual employees.

Furthermore, it’s essential to engage team leads who can offer valuable insights into identifying skill gaps among employees within their respective departments.

2. Define your goals

Without defining proper goals, any type of analysis and as crucial as skills can be resulted wrong.

Understanding the future of your organization, on a short-term basis, such as a year from now, as well as in the long term, like four years ahead is how you can set your target skills needed.

To determine your goals, you need to ask some questions that can help you clear your future goals, including;

1. In which direction our organization is going or where do we want to lead it?
2. Are there any significant developments/challenges within the next 12 months?
3. Which skill sets will the future employees need to acquire to reach our objectives?
4. What areas of the business are we lacking in resources or knowledge?

3. Measuring current skills

Knowing where you want to reach first requires to understand where you are. This can help you to determine the ‘distance’ to reach your target as well can help you prepare the ‘bridge.’

Therefore, identifying your company’s current skill set is crucial to understand where you are lacking as a team as well as an individual employee.

There are various methods to assess your current skills, through skills assessments, surveys, or interviews with employees to run an organisational diagnostic.

You can also obtain valuable information for your skills gap analysis by obtaining data from:

• Rates of turnover
• Key performance indicators that have not been met (KPIs)
• Performance appraisals
• Discussions with key front-line managers
• Team evaluations
• Job knowledge assessments
• 360-degree feedback
• Behavioral evaluations

Further, to measure the distance between current and required skills, you might consider organising the data collected in a systematic various ways.

4. Determine future skills required

To identify gaps in skills and knowledge, you need to consider the organisation’s goals as well as conduct a skills gap analysis quiz.

By aligning analysis with future goals and industry trends, organizations can identify the skills necessary to achieve their objectives

However, not every skill will be required for your business. So, before assessing skill gaps, there are two critical factors to consider:

• What skills do you value as a company?
• What skills do you believe are necessary for your employees to perform well now and in the future?

Understand your employees to find out what skills they lack and have the potential to learn.

Involving them in this process will make them feel included and will help them understand what skills they lack.

5. Identify and implement the gaps

You can identify areas of mismatch once you have conducted a skills gap analysis, measured the current gaps in your workforce’s skills and compared them to future skills.

You can analyze the data you’ve collected to understand the critical skills, for example, you get information like:

• New hires who lack the technical knowledge required to operate upcoming machinery or software that will be introduced to your industry within the next five years.
• Existing employees are not keeping up with changing legal jargon in the medical or insurance industries.

Identifying these gaps can assist you in designing learning pathways and determining the priorities for your future business.

It is important to communicate your findings with your employees and provide them with choice and curated learning pathways to shift their skills.

You can start small, like picking one department or geographic unit where there’s an obvious challenge and a clear path to overcome that.

A suitable approach involves a mix of hiring, training, and pursuing certification courses.

Besides, encouraging employees to attend webinars, conferences, or industry-specific events to help them gain skills and knowledge.

As technology evolves, so do the skill requirements of businesses. As a result, conducting a skill gap analysis only once is insufficient. The analysis must be performed continuously.

How to Create a Skill Gap Analysis Quiz?

Here are the steps to create a skills gap analysis quiz, there are various plugins in WordPress to create quizzes, surveys, or assessments for your website.

In this case, we are using our QSM plugin to create the skill gap analysis assessment. You can follow these similar steps in other quiz plugins as well.

Step 1: Start by setting up a quiz

If you have a WordPress website, then you’ll have to start with installing the plugin in your dashboard. You can see the documentation to know how to get started with the QSM plugin.

Then, move forward to create a quiz from a scratch or use templates (most of the quiz plugins offer various template options) to try a different aesthetic of your quiz/assessment.

The QSM plugin offers you both the capacity to create a quiz or form. It also comes with various customization options to not only setup a quiz but create the overall feel of it.

In professional settings, online forms have to be confidential, so you can add user login access to the skill gap analysis form so that only your organization’s employees access it.

Also Read: How to Create a Quiz for Logged-in Users?

Besides, you can limit the answers and users attempts to not overload with information and collect the data diligently.

Learn How to Create a Quiz in QSM

Step 2: Create a proper questionnaire

The most important part of any quiz is the questionnaire. While creating a skill gap analysis quiz, one should remember to equip the questions that assess knowledge or a skill set.

The questions you create depends on the departments’ skills you want to assess or required skills you want to target to.

For instance, if we talk about assessing current marketing potential and the future goals for marketing department of your organization,

You can mentions questions that focus on;

• What are the current skills employees by every employee in marketing demands?

• Are those skills working efficiently towards the goals you have prepared for the team? Or they proving to be ineffective.

• What are the required skills for employees to have to target future organizational goals?

• What experiences do the employees need to have to be ready for the required skills?

It is essential to identify soft skills and help employees work through them with motivation and support.

To identify a soft skill gap, you can create a role-centric quiz and assess the qualities required for the role by a questionnaire.

Once you have prepare the questionnaire, you can add it to your quiz, besides QSM quiz plugin comes with various question types that can opt for.

Step 3: Sharing the quiz with employees

Once you have added your questionnaire to the quiz page, you can publish the quiz and share it with your employees through the link.

Or you can even choose to embed the quiz in your website so that they can be fruitfully accessed by your company’s people.

As you start getting the data, you can collect the information and analyse the data by organising it systematically. QSM plugin offers you with the add-on integrations like Sync with Google Sheets and Reporting and Analysis to organise and analyse the data.

Check out a sample skill gap analysis quiz created using the QSM plugin.

If you want to try the quiz we have created using the QSM plugin for skills gap analysis, then you can try it now.

FAQS

Final thoughts

For an HR professional striving to optimize talent, a business leader aiming for operational excellence, or an entrepreneur ready to elevate the team’s capabilities, this article is packed with the insights you need. 

Many companies do not invest in their employees’ success. Instead of looking for ways to increase employee engagement through learning and development opportunities, they unknowingly hire people.

Also Read: 10 Fun Quizzes and Surveys for Team Building and Employee Engagement

But skills gap analysis helps you do that and using plugins like QSM you can create your own skill gap analysis quiz.

You can also ease your hiring process by creating quizzes for job interviews and recruitment.