What is a skills gap

What is a Skills Gap?

Plainly put, a skills gap is the difference between the skills you have and the skills you need. Though it might sound simple, understanding your skills gaps and identifying them, then knowing how to solve this problem, can be far from easy.

Where to find your skills gaps

The skills gaps in your workforce can be across the breadth of your employees, or it can be found in individuals, or both. Your employees may have their own particular skills, and you may be lacking in workers who have certain skills your company needs, or it could be that individuals don’t have the range of skills that allows them to complete tasks. To evaluate the situation regarding the skills gap in your organisation, it’s important you perform a skills gap analysis.

Organisational skills gaps

The workplace is constantly evolving and keeping up with changes can be a challenge. As the shape and face of your business alters you may find you need to expand a job role to include additional skills, or to improve your efficiency you need to combine two roles into one. This creates problems if your employees don’t have the skills required to take on this work. You could employ someone new, but it might be easier and less costly to offer training programs to your staff in new skills. Even better, create a workforce who are proficient in skills across the board so they can adapt to changes quickly and easily.

Soft skills vs hard skills

If you think you’ll only have a gap in hard skills, think again. Soft skills can be equally difficult to cover, especially when it comes to new hires. In the blog, Top 5 Skills Gaps in the Workforce, you’ll find there’s an equal mix of soft skills and hard skills that need to be maintained, and that both areas are equally vital to your business. So, it isn’t only about technical skills, that’s true, but it’s often the case that these are the skills a company, or its individuals, is lacking in most. Be smart and make sure you are covering all areas of skills needed.

Why is the skills gap such a problem?

The rate at which the skills we need is moving is faster than the rate at which we, as a society, are producing workers with those skills. The education system hasn’t quite caught up with this pace yet and so we end up with a gap between what we have and what we need. This is a problem no matter what your business is, but there are ways to deal with this.

Clear out your bottleneck

In a chain of process, the lack of skills in any area can create a bottleneck that slows down your production. At Comurce we can help you identify where your bottleneck is and why it has been created, and from there you can pinpoint your organisational skills gaps. We offer ways of empowering your workforce, through tech education and realising the importance of softs skills as well as hard skills.