What is a skills gap analysis?
A structured comparison between the skills an organisation or individual has and the skills they need, producing a prioritised list of what to develop or acquire.
The process:
Define the skills required. Not job titles but specific capabilities, at defined levels of proficiency — and this is where most analyses fail, because "communication" or "leadership" cannot be assessed against anything.
Assess current capability. Through self-assessment, manager assessment, testing, or observed performance. Self-assessment alone is unreliable in both directions — the well-documented tendency of less skilled people to overestimate, and of more skilled people to underestimate.
Identify the gaps, by skill and by proficiency level.
Prioritise. Not every gap matters equally: weight by business criticality, by how many people are affected, by how hard the skill is to acquire, and by how easily it can be bought in instead.
Decide the response — build (train), buy (recruit), borrow (contract), or redesign the work so the skill is not required.
Where it is used: workforce planning, before a change of technology or strategy, in succession planning, and by individuals assessing a career move.
A skills matrix is the usual artefact — people against skills, with proficiency levels. Its incidental benefits are frequently the most valuable: it makes single points of failure visible where only one person can do something critical, and it reveals where succession cover does not exist.
The common failures:
Assessing against today's requirements, when the point is future capability. A gap analysis that describes the present is a description, not a plan.
Vague skill definitions that cannot be assessed consistently.
Producing the analysis and doing nothing, which is the most frequent outcome and destroys credibility for the next attempt.
Treating all gaps as training problems, when some are recruitment, process or tooling problems.
Ignoring what people can already do outside their formal role, which surveys routinely uncover.
For individuals, the same method works: list the capabilities required for the role you want, from actual job advertisements, assess yourself honestly against them, and prioritise the gaps that appear most often.