Every year, HR and business leaders decide which skills their people should develop next. Most of those decisions start from assumptions: what managers believe their teams need, what employees say they lack, what the last incident exposed.
The intent is right. The starting point is weak. Before a company decides where to invest, it should know where skills are actually missing, and rank those gaps by how much they matter.
Before you plan which skills to build, map which ones are missing.
Why most companies cannot do this today
Skills are now at the centre of how organisations want to work. In a 2022 Deloitte survey of HR and business executives, 89% said skills are becoming more important for how organisations define work, deploy talent and manage careers. Yet only between 15% and 30%, depending on the practice, had adopted skills-based approaches to a significant extent.
The gap between intent and practice has a simple cause: most companies have no reliable data on what their people actually know. Each of the usual sources has a blind spot:
Completion records
show who finished a course, not who understood it.
Self-assessments
depend on people judging their own skills. A review by Dunning, Heath and Suls found that self-ratings have only a modest relationship with actual performance, and that people on average rate themselves above average.
Manager evaluations
are infrequent and vary from one manager to the next.
Competency matrices
describe the skills a role needs, not the skills people have.
The result is a development plan built on presumed needs.
A wrong answer tells you more than a completed course
When people answer a question about a procedure, a product or a policy, they produce evidence. A correct answer shows that the point landed. A wrong answer shows exactly where it did not.
One wrong answer says little. Thousands of answers across a company form a map.
A completed course tells you who took part. A wrong answer tells you what is missing.
What patterns of wrong answers reveal
Read in aggregate, wrong answers fall into three patterns, and each one points to a different action:
Many people miss the same exercise.
The issue may not be the people: the source document may be unclear, or the procedure itself may be confusing. Fix the source before anything else.
Many people choose the same wrong option.
A specific misconception is in circulation, often a rule that changed or an old habit. Address that misconception directly.
Only a few people miss an exercise.
The gap is narrow. Targeted reinforcement for those people is enough, and the rest of the company does not need it.
Ranking exercises by how often they are answered wrongly turns these patterns into a priority list. The exercises at the top are the gaps to close first.
From the map to a plan
A skill gap analysis built on answers changes how a development plan is made:
Start from the top of the list.
Invest first where errors are most frequent and where a mistake costs the most.
Fix the source, then re-test.
After correcting a document or a procedure, ask the same question again a few weeks later.
Watch the ranking move.
When an exercise drops out of the most-missed list, the gap is closing. If it stays at the top, the fix did not work.
Unlike a survey or an annual review, this map updates itself while people work.
The first step towards a skills-based organisation
A skills-based organisation needs to know which skills it has and where they are missing. Many companies start by designing taxonomies and frameworks. Starting from evidence is faster: the exercises people answer every week already show where knowledge has not yet become a skill.
For more on the shift, read creating skills in the flow of work.
Where zick learn fits
zick learn turns company documents, presentations and videos into short microlearning lessons, each ending with a true/false or multiple-choice exercise. Every answer is recorded, right or wrong, with when it was given and which option was chosen. The Exercises view lists the exercises people miss most often, so HR and managers can see which know-how is not landing and which content to fix first.
To see it with your own content, request a demo.
Frequently asked questions
What is a skill gap analysis?
It compares the skills an organisation needs with the skills its people actually have, so it can decide where to invest first.
How is a skill gap analysis different from a training needs analysis?
A training needs analysis usually starts from what people should be taught. A skill gap analysis starts from what people can and cannot do today, measured on evidence such as answers to concrete questions, and then decides what to develop first.
Why are self-assessments not enough for a skill gap analysis?
Research on self-assessment shows that people's ratings of their own skills relate only modestly to their actual performance. Answers to concrete questions are more reliable evidence.
How often should a skill gap analysis be updated?
Every time products, procedures or rules change. When the analysis is built on the answers people give in their daily work, it updates continuously.
Sources: Deloitte, The skills-based organization (2022) · Dunning, Heath and Suls, Flawed Self-Assessment, Psychological Science in the Public Interest (2004) · zick learn FAQ
