Skill gaps appear when your employees lack the skills needed to achieve a specific goal, preventing them from succeeding. In other words, the term stands for when the employees cannot fulfil the needs/requirements of their employers because they don’t have the right knowledge, skills, or abilities.
Skill gaps can be put into 2 different categories: a development or a management issue that can affect the performance and productivity of an individual or a team of people.
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Either type of skill gap has its own impact on your company culture and its progression. Furthermore, identifying skill gaps is critical to building effective and focused training programs. To identify the existing skill gaps in your workforce, consider the following basic steps:
No matter how efficient your workforce is, along with the growth of your business, it’ll take more skills than they already possessed for them to be able to accomplish more complicated tasks.
Planning ahead of your company's goals helps you to better identify what training your employees need now, plus in the future. As this step may sound simple and easy to be overlooked, identifying your company's goals first allows you to decide, for example, whether it is more important to focus on technology training, customer service skills, or both, or something else.
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As we all know, each type of job requires different skills from your employees. Your IT staff probably wouldn’t need as many sales skills as your Business Development team or Sale team does.
To ensure that you are on the right track in planning additional training or courses for your staff, you need to describe the skills most needed for each job type in your company. Moreover, doing this would provide useful information for your assessment process.
Prioritise the critical skills based on position level. For example, a senior team member or a team leader post would likely need expert-level skills while there will be other tasks that just require only basic knowledge. Make sure that your managers are aware of what their subordinates are expecting to know and the knowledge they are supposed to attain in the future.
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This is the most important step of the whole process since it decides what aspect you need to take action on. There are many approaches that you can use to gather data and assess your employees:
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After assessing your employee’s capabilities, you can start making an action plan for both training and hiring in order to fill in the most important missing pieces. The planning process should be clear and precise on what support is needed to complete, how long it takes for the training stages, etc. Training can be in the form of coaching, mentoring, e-learning programs and more.
The next move for organisations in order to win the talent struggle is cultivating their own workforce with proper training and development. Therefore, identifying skill gaps is fundamental for organisations to ensure that their workforce is well-trained, knowledgeable and well-prepared for the future growth of the business. Resolving the skill gap raises employees’ awareness of their learning needs and helps break down any resistance to learning new skills.
We are in a new era of talent selection where each position requires much more sophisticated skill and knowledge from your personnel. In addition to skill-oriented recruitment, we need to consider more of the three Ps of talent selection: potential, performance, and fit-for-purpose.
Infographic: Distinguishing Between High Potential and High-Performing Employees
A helpful talent management platform enables organisations to know, grow, and engage their employees – ultimately unlocking their potential to the fullest. Analysing your employee skill gaps is a way to remind them of the skills the agency needs, now and in the future, hence raising the awareness of the critical skills they’ll need to grow.
One way to bridge any skill gap is through consistent and streamlined team training. At TRG Academy,
At TRG Academy, our industry experts have spent years developing a comprehensive, on-demand knowledge base that aims at streamlining the learning and development of not only our customers but also our internal teams.
The platform comprises practical, hands-on, and most importantly, easy-to-understand online courses that enable you and your team to:
Today, TRG Academy has more than 1,000 lessons on a variety of solutions from Infor SunSystems to Infor Q&A, TEBIS, and more.
Check out more about TRG Academy for teams and how to sign up here.