Identifying and Quantifying Personnel Skill Gaps

One of the issues organizations face is identifying the required skills needed for a position and then evaluating if their personnel have these skills or if there is a “skills gap”. A “skills gap” is the distance between the position requirements and the skills currently possessed by the person in that position. At issue is the lack of a framework to clearly identify the required skills. A composite skills gap model has been developed that can be adapted to any occupation and give quantitative results to help determine worker-to-job fit and help identify gaps. By applying the model to identify position requirements and worker qualifications, organizations can move personnel to better suited positions or utilize needed training in the specific areas identified. This type of model addresses the shortcomings identified in previous models by getting the worker and position information into the same language for comparisons. With technology moving towards automation, robotics and artificial intelligence, this type of model can identify what skills are necessary for “re-tooling” the workforce to meet the needs to support these systems. Additionally, the framework provides a theoretical foundation for skills gap analyses that allows for more analytical research in this area.