How to Identify Skills Gaps in Your Organization
A skills assessment is a tool for understanding your people and creating targeted, meaningful learning and development strategies that support individual growth and organizational goals.
The hidden benefits of Skills Assessments
Imagine this:
You’re driving a car, but you have no idea how much gas is in the tank, what warning lights might be on, or if you’re even heading in the right direction.
Sounds crazy, right?
An Organizational GPS for Talent Development
Yet this is exactly how most organizations approach employee training – flying blind and hoping for the best.
You know what most leaders miss when it comes to training?
Understanding what their people can actually do.
Enter the skills assessment – your organizational GPS for talent development.
What's a Skills Assessement, Anyway?
A skills assessment is a tool for understanding your people and creating targeted, meaningful learning and development strategies that support individual growth and organizational goals.
Think of a skills assessment as a savvy detective’s investigation into your team’s capabilities relative to what you’re asking of them..
The exercise is not just about checking boxes or finding weaknesses. It’s about uncovering the hidden superpowers your employees already possess and identifying exactly what they need to level up.
When you do a skills assessment, you find the answers to the BIG questions that should guide training investment decisions:
- Are we directing our resources to the place that’s going to have the most impact?
- Are we making a strategic, targeted investment in people development that aligns to our business goals?
The Real Magic of Skills Assessment
The real magic of a skills assessment is that it helps you understand exactly where your team is right now, maps the gaps in their knowledge, skills and attitudes in their desired performance, and creates laser-focused training that matters.
The best skills assessments aren’t just about identifying gaps. They’re about recognizing strengths and creating a roadmap for development that considers the human factors of learning and change.
With a skills assessment you can be sure you’re not flying blind, instead, you’re creating the conditions for your people to be brilliant and achieve your goals.
Real-World Example: Upgrading to a new Case Management System
We worked with an organization that had to switch out their existing case management system for another. While the new system worked similarly to their existing one, it added some new features for managing cases and AI and machine learning capabilities anticipated to make it easier for case managers and administrators to get their work done.
Their first instinct? Send everyone, managers and employees alike, on a 2-day standard “how to use the system” training provided by the vendor.
Our assessment revealed something different: Focusing primarily on software training missed the deeper organizational change. In fact, much of the offered software training would be a waste of time. What seemed like a simple software upgrade was actually complex. Implementing the new system required a deeper organizational transformation that affected business rules.
The real change wasn’t about implementing a new software. It was about shifting internal policies, changing employee roles and responsibilities, working with business partners in new ways, and adapting work practices and decision-making authorities. The new system had built-in checks and balances that made it unnecessary to get supervisor and management approvals as they moved a case through the system and ensured that work that was outside the scope of this team’s work wouldn’t even make it into the system. As a result, managers and employees alike needed to unlearn previous work practices and adopt new beliefs around their roles and responsibilities.
The software skills needed to use the new case management system were minimal compared to the adaptive needs. Everyone already had the basic computer skills to use a case management system. The challenge was understanding and accepting new organizational expectations and ensuring they had the knowledge, skills, and attitudes to enable that transition.
The Bottom Line
A skills assessment isn’t a luxury. It’s your organizational GPS to talent development, critical to understanding the talent you have, supporting their growth and aligning their development to your organizational goals.
It’s the difference between hoping your team will magically improve and strategically unleashing their potential. Between throwing money at generic training and investing precisely where it matters most.
Stop flying blind when it comes to talent development. Start understanding.
Want to transform how you develop talent? A skills assessment might just be your first step.
Book a FREE 30-minute discovery call with me to learn more.
About TouchPoints Learning & Innovation
We are an enthusiastic team of experts in learning, change and innovation. We help organizations solve business problems through facilitated creative problem-solving, team development services, outcome-driven innovation, and custom training development and delivery.
