Read the skill gap analysis

What this achieves

Gap analysis compares what your roles require against what your people have recorded, and lists the skills where the most employees fall short. It answers “which capabilities are we short of”, one skill at a time.

Required role: Administrator.

Before you start

This analysis only works where both halves of the comparison exist. Roles need their required skills recorded on their job profiles, and employees need their skills recorded against them. Where either side is missing, the analysis is not wrong — it has nothing to compare.

Steps

Go to Talent & Growth → Insights → Skill Gaps.
Choose the Scope.
For Department or Team, choose which one.
Read the chart, then the gap detail table beneath it.
Select a skill name to open it in the skill library.

Scope

Option	Description
Company-wide	Every employee and position in the company.
Department	One department’s employees and positions.
Team	One team’s employees and positions.

The line at the end of the scope row tells you how many employees and how many positions the analysis covered. Read it before the table — it is the population every number below describes.

Example: scoping to Engineering at HC Corp reports on 34 employees and the positions within Engineering. The same skill can show a large gap company-wide and no gap inside Engineering, and both readings are correct.

The gap detail table

Option	Description
Skill	The skill being measured. Select it to open the skill in the library.
Category	The skill’s category.
Required	How many times the skill is required across the positions in scope.
Met	How many of those requirements are met at the required level.
Gap	Required less met — the number of employees below the required level for that skill.
Severity	How large this gap is relative to the largest gap in this result set.

The chart above the table is the same data: the top ten skills by gap count.

Severity is relative, not absolute

This is the column most often misread. Severity compares each row to the biggest gap currently on screen. The largest gap always shows as the most severe, whether it is 40 people or 4.

That has a consequence: severity changes when you change scope, because the comparison set changes. A skill that reads as low severity company-wide can read as high severity inside a single department.

Example: a gap of 3 in Finance at HC Corp, where Finance has 9 people, shows as severe if it is the largest gap in Finance. The same gap sits near the bottom of the company-wide list. Use the Gap column for size and severity only for ranking within one view.

An empty result is not automatically good news

If the screen reports no gaps at company scope, there are two possible explanations and they are very different.

Option	Description
Requirements are genuinely met	Every skill required by your job profiles is held at the required level.
There is nothing to compare	Job profiles do not state their skill and competency requirements, so no requirement exists to fall short of.

The screen says this itself when the result is empty: it suggests changing scope, and it suggests checking that job profiles carry competency mappings. Check the second before believing the first.

Partial credit is not given

An employee below the required level for a skill counts towards the gap. Holding the skill at a lower level than the role requires does not reduce the gap by a fraction — the requirement is either met or it is not.

Example: a role at HC Corp requiring a skill at level 4 counts James Whitfield as a gap while he is at level 3. His level 3 is real and visible on the heatmap, but it does not partly close the requirement.

What happens next

A gap is a starting point and the size tells you what kind of response fits. A gap of one or two is usually a course or a development plan for named people. A gap across most of a team is usually a hiring decision or a sign the job profile asks for something the market does not supply. Use the heatmap to see whether a gap is spread across a team or concentrated in a few people, because those need different answers.