Compare skill supply and demand

What this achieves

Two screens compare how much of a skill you have against how much of it you need. One is calculated live every time you open it; the other is an analysis you generate and keep, which also brings in market direction and a recommendation per skill.

Required role: Administrator.

Which screen answers which question

Option	Description
Demand & Supply	Where do we stand right now? Derived when you open the screen, so it is always current. Filterable, but it has no history and no market view.
Skill Trends	What should we do about it? A stored analysis you generate for a scope, adding market direction, a recommendation per skill, and emerging skills. It stays as it was until you generate again.

The distinction matters because the two screens can disagree, and both can be right. Demand & Supply describes today; Skill Trends describes the day it was generated.

Example: HC Corp generates a company skill-trend analysis in April and hires four engineers in May. In June the trend analysis still shows April’s supply, while Demand & Supply shows the four new people. Generate a fresh analysis rather than assuming one of them is broken.

Steps: read the live comparison

Go to Talent & Growth → Insights → Demand & Supply.
Read the four figures across the top.
Narrow the table with Search, Category, Direction, or Trending only.
Read the table.

The figures across the top

Option	Description
Skills analyzed	Skills included in the comparison.
Under-supplied	Skills where demand exceeds supply.
Over-supplied	Skills where supply exceeds demand.
Most needed	The skill with the largest shortfall.

These four figures describe the whole comparison and do not respond to the filters below them. Filtering the table to one category leaves the counts above unchanged — they are the totals, not a summary of what you are looking at.

The table

Option	Description
Skill	The skill being compared.
Supply	How much of the skill you hold.
Demand	How much of the skill is required.
Gap	Demand less supply. Positive means under-supplied, negative means over-supplied, zero means balanced.
Avg level	Average proficiency among the people who hold it.
Visualization	Supply and demand drawn side by side for the row.

The sign of the Gap is the whole reading. The Direction filter states the rule on screen: under-supplied is a gap above zero, over-supplied is a gap below zero, balanced is exactly zero.

Example: a skill at HC Corp with demand 12 and supply 7 shows a gap of +5 and sits under Under-supplied. A skill with demand 2 and supply 9 shows −7 and sits under Over-supplied — which is worth reading before assuming every negative number is good news.

Trending only narrows the table to skills flagged as moving in the market.

Steps: generate a trend analysis

Go to Talent & Growth → Insights → Skill Trends.
Choose the Scope — Company, Department, or Industry.
For Department, pick which one.
Select Generate trends, then Generate.

What the analysis measures

The screen states its own method before you run it. Supply counts employees who hold the skill at level 3 or above; that is set against internal demand and market direction. It is aggregation over your own records, and it consumes no AI credits.

Example: at HC Corp, an engineer recorded at level 2 in a skill does not count towards supply for it. That threshold is why trend supply can read lower than a headcount of everyone who has the skill recorded at all.

The figures and the table

Option	Description
Skills analyzed	Skills covered by this analysis.
Recommended INVEST	Skills the analysis recommends building.
Recommended PHASE OUT	Skills the analysis recommends winding down.
Emerging market skills	Skills rising in the market that you do not yet hold in depth, each with a relevance score.

The table adds Market and Recommendation to the same supply, demand, and gap columns.

Option	Description
Invest	Build this capability — hire for it, train for it, or both.
Maintain	Hold the position you have.
Phase out	Wind the capability down.

A recommendation is arithmetic over your data plus a market signal. It does not know your strategy, and a Phase out on a skill your next product depends on is the analysis being uninformed rather than right.

Narrative and history

The analysis carries a written narrative summarising the tables. Where two or more analyses exist for a scope, an analysis history lists the recent ones with their date, scope, and skill count, which is how you see movement between two runs.

The screen shows only the latest analysis for the chosen scope. Changing the scope shows a different analysis, or an empty state if that scope has never been analysed.

What happens next

An under-supply is either a hiring decision or a learning decision, and the size tells you which. An over-supply is worth a second look before you act on it — capability you are not currently using is not automatically waste, and phasing it out is hard to reverse. Emerging market skills are the input to next year’s job profiles rather than to this month’s plan.