Identify Skill Gaps in a Workforce

Sample Scenario

A Talent Development Manager is asked to identify skill gaps in two business units to support the professional growth of the employees and make the business more competitive. The skill gaps are needed for a future upskilling initiative.

Solutions

The Talent Development Manager must understand the current capabilities of employees in the two business units. This begins with the creation of employee profiles using the Create Employee API after extracting skills using the Parse Resume API. Employees will review their profiles and refine the results of the automated skill extraction, adding and removing skills as needed.

Having a thorough inventory of employee skills provides the foundation for identifying skill gaps.

The next step is to compare each employee’s skills to their defined position in the company using the Match Employee to Position API. Each Position contains a set of skills that define it and provide the standard against which the employees skills are compared. The Match Employee to Position API identifies missing skills and skills that should be trained to raise their competency level.

If the organization does not have well defined internal positions, the employee skills can be compared to labor market skills for a similar job title. The employee job title should be normalized and used to retrieve skills by calling the Career Path Get Skills by Title API. The labor market and employee skills can be compared using the Career Path Compare Skills API. Labor market skills for a position are more general but can also provide a good starting point for identifying skill gaps.