How to Conduct a Gap Analysis

Good managers provide their teams with the necessary skills, tools, and resources to satisfy the company’s current needs. Great managers provide their teams with the resources they require to fulfil the company’s long-term objectives.

A gap analysis is a tool that managers can use to detect gaps between their teams’ existing talents and the skills they’ll need to meet future objectives.

The gap analysis doesn’t have to be difficult, but you must commit to a few things before you begin:

Acknowledge your shortcomings. It can be difficult to accept your mistakes, but in order to do an effective gap analysis, you must be brutally honest about what isn’t working in your company.

Also, be honest with yourself about your abilities. Don’t be too modest about your accomplishments. To assist you focus on the unfavourable parts of your organisation, you must first understand the positive aspects.

Keep your expectations in check. You’ll start defining goals for the future in the later stages of your gap analysis. Given your limits, these objectives must be reasonable and practical.

Be as precise as possible. Avoid ambiguous words or intangible results in any element of your gap analysis (current state, intended future state, and action plan). For both your current and future stages, make sure to include a mix of qualitative and quantitative measures.

These are the four steps to conducting a gap analysis:

• Define the state you want to achieve in the future. Where do you see your company or team going?
• Evaluate your current situation. What is the status of your team or company now?
• Determine where the gaps are. What is the gap between where you are now and where you want to be?
• Fill in the gaps. What particular steps can you take to help your staff develop the abilities they require?

An individual or organisational gap analysis can be performed. It can be used to assist people in charting their next steps in their growth, as well as departments, teams, and corporations in identifying their most critical needs. A gap analysis will assist you in determining the most effective allocation of training resources.

Make use of spreadsheets. Spreadsheets are a simple tool for doing numerical or metric-based gap analysis. In one column, write your target numbers, and in another, write your current numbers. Create a third column to automatically calculate the difference between the two columns and show where the gaps are. However, keep in mind that you’ll need to conduct some detective work and enquire as to why there is a discrepancy in determining the root cause of the gap.

The key takeaways

A gap analysis is a tool that managers use to detect gaps between their teams’ existing talents and the skills they’ll need to meet future objectives. It can be used to assist people in charting their next steps in their growth, as well as departments, teams, and corporations in identifying their most critical needs.