Mr. Steven Haines makes a very good point about needing an absolute evaluation of employee needs. This is particularly true of the technical skills an engineer, safety tech, auditor, accountant, etcetera, work with versus the soft skills that sales reps, managers, and executives rely on.

Most professionals inherently think of themselves as educated and competent, regardless of their actual technical skill set or proficiency. At the very least, technical professionals are inclined to assume they understand technical matters “as well as anyone else.” This creates a need for an absolute exam to eliminate the subjectiveness of “I feel my skills are up to par” type responses.

The challenge in developing a skills assessment that has right and wrong answers is that:

2) The evaluation must be created by a subject-matter expert. The outsourcing and cost cutting that’s occurred over the last several years has left fewer and fewer companies with in-office subject matter experts.

Because few of those subject matter experts have a place in the C-suite where business decisions and strategy are made the first change effort is to get subject matter experts into the same room as executives and senior managers. Many executives won’t want to get bogged down in details. As a result upper management becomes over dependent on the gut feeling of their technical professionals.

If you’re serious about improving the performance and skill level of technical professionals, details matter. The skills gap must be evaluated in absolute terms. This also assists in creating a more focused training program when your ready to address the deficiency.

The survey plus the heat-map representation together provide a quick representation of skills-gap. However, I agree that the survey technique in itself may lack a reference model, thereby allowing certain magnitude of error. For example: For one survey respondent, the survey question on direction-setting may communicate a long-term vision while for another it may well mean the goal-setting for his/her department.

The survey would invite more avenues for error, as the respondent moves from skill-based questions to those reflecting behavior/attitude!

On the other hand, the heat-map DOES provide a quick view of items that the manager (or the corporate learning department) should focus on for the next term.

Recommendation: I would believe this technique to be quite effective for managers of zones (of similar competencies) to map the skill-gaps of his/her people. To avoid errors, the manager could meet the team members one-on-one OR have meetings with representatives if the team size is a constraint.

Good to see some practical, concrete efforts at assessing individuals’ skills. Would the same approach be applicable to self-assessment of team capabilities? If such capabilities consist of individual skills + availability of required information + existence of effective processes to get the team’s tasks done, then knowing about individuals’ skills alone may not be enough. A team might, for example, know that a certain activity takes too long, costs too much or is not done well enough, and also know that the reason for the specific problem is limited or too-slow access to information or laborious processes that obstruct even those groups who are skilled and experienced.

The outcomes of a skills-gap analysis should be taken as no more than an important initial image when starting a transformation process. During the actual development process one will discover the real root causes for the findings. And when leadership and teams then dare to also explore the informal factors or the subconscious world ‘underneath’ the formally measured patterns, a rather different picture will arise of the gaps between the required and the actual performance, committment, and skills. This then asks for an equally different development focus and transformation process. Also, a skills-gap analysis should not be used as a one-time problem identification tool. Skills gaps are unavoidable, even natural phenomena in changing organisations. Therefore one should monitor on a regular basis how such gaps evolve and adjust the learning and developing processes accordingly. Finally, such management and leadership development should not be a ‘project’ but a continuous activity, part of the organisational development layer. It should be ‘stand alone’ in its focus on the development of the professional/individual, but also well connected to the business performance measuring.

This is a valid approach but it seems more likely the gap in understanding is a function of management too distant from their workforce and poor organizational structure without appropriate information conduits.

As part of our Success-as-a-service management coaching program, we use a similar skills gap analysis method.

However, asking colleagues (with their own career ladder motives) to rate each other’s skills can deliver data at temporary expense of causing unnecessary tensions. The restlessly ambitious individuals often treat such exercises as gamesmanship opportunity to advance their own careers.

One of the challenges in having employees evaluate their own skill level is that there isn’t always a reference model or a benchmark against which to compare the outcomes. All employees come from different functional areas, and may assess their skills only through the paradigms of the functions from which they’ve come. For example, in the area of product management, practitioners come from marketing, engineering, sales, operations, and so on. Further, they tend to carry out their jobs based on their experience, not based on a best-in-class reference model.

A more interesting and effective approach would be to use an experiential competency assessment, geared to the particular job category. You really don’t want to understand what employees believe they know. You do want to find out how they perceive their level of experience in a specific work activity, or set of activities, that rest within a given set of competency clusters for that job category. When you have the data (e.g., experiential profiles) you can be better focused in identifying learning and development interventions and explicit performance objectives.

Furthermore, this type of experiential assessment sets the stage for a series of future assessments that allow the organization to reset its baseline from time to time to determine how well learning and development interventions ‘stick.’ Furthermore it’s even more ideal when explicit performance objectives are linked to business results. That’s a true challenge for functional leaders and HR/OD counterparts.

This approach to organizational development will have a greater impact on the organization, and can put a more structured methodology into place that can be fine-tuned as the organization evolves. Ultimately, with the right amount of targeting experiential development, and the right training, the individuals who participate in these programs may become the business leaders of the future.

Skills gap analysis is a valid approach in identifying which competency to tackle first, yet the exercise itself is daunting and time consuming for large organizations with high populations.

I believe one of the best approaches is to conduct anonymous surveys as people would feel more comfortable and open up. Heat maps as mentioned in the article as well as impact maps are best practices of somehow visualizing the “what is” and the “what if” scenarios.

One thing that companies have to keep in mind is to keep a holistic view over competency development. When shifting into a cost-cutting mode, many shift their focus towards the development of business competencies so to ensure a bigger market share and increase profitability, yet neglecting H&S, compliance awareness, and training might cost the company dearly.

This is indeed a the right way to go about analyzing the skill gaps in an organization. However, in my experience, I have come to realize that when a skill gap assessment is announced, many employees subconsciously treat it as an appraisal of sorts. If there is a peer review of capabilities it almost sounds like a 360 appraisal. To avoid these side effects, I would recommend that:
1. The motive of the exercise is communicated very well to the employees highlighting the fact that this is not an appraisal and the results will be used only to assign trainings.
2. Immediate superiors should not be involved in assessing skill gaps to avoid skewed reviews. Once people around the organizations know that their day-to-day managers will not be involved in the process, any attempt at collusion or artificially inflating or deflating the skills will be greatly reduced.