How to plan and conduct a successful skills gap analysis

Business needs change fast, and the skills your workforce had yesterday may not be enough tomorrow. It’s not always easy to keep up. Small and mid-sized companies in particular have limited resources, so it’s not feasible to hire out every time a gap surfaces.

And with AI technology now a growing part of many employees’ everyday workflows, this skill gap problem is more pressing than ever. AI tools can be productivity multipliers, and workforces that don’t know how to use them effectively may get left behind.

According to our latest Workforce Trends Report, 38% of employees feel they can’t keep up with the pace of AI adoption their leadership expects.* If you’re not sure whether this problem affects your teams, check out our AI Readiness Assessment to see where your organization stands.

The good news is that, while small and mid-sized companies can’t usually compete based on capital alone, you can get ahead by working smarter. In this guide, we’ll show you how to use skills gap analysis to prioritize high-impact competencies, both AI-centered and more traditional, while connecting them directly to performance and growth.

*Leapsome, 2026

What’s a skills gap analysis, and how can it help your organization?

To conduct a skills gap analysis, sometimes called a talent gap analysis, you’ll assess the difference between your workforce’s current capabilities and what it needs to meet present and future business needs. This process starts with identifying critical skills and gathering data about existing capacities, then noting where the two lists diverge.

Regular skills gap analysis helps HR: 

• Gain visibility into workforce capabilities: A thorough analysis formalizes competency data and organizes it clearly, creating a strong starting point for workforce planning.

• Strengthen employee development and growth: You’ll see exactly where there’s room for improvement, and be better positioned to build targeted training programs. According to research by Deloitte Insights, skills-based strategies boost both productivity and value, while helping organizations innovate.

• Minimize the need for new hires: Reskilling through employee development plans is a cost-effective alternative to bringing new hires onboard. Skills gap analysis helps you find the best candidates, which is especially valuable when you’re working with a tight budget.

Running a skills gap analysis at scale

“We’re seeing the move from a jobs-based economy to a skills-based one, and AI is the catalyst. It helps identify skill gaps, recommend learning, and personalize development at scale.”
– Luck Dookchitra, former VP of People and Culture at Leapsome

As your company grows, skills gap analysis is most valuable when connected to broad business goals. You can’t focus on a single employee or team’s performance; you need to place your review within as broad an organizational context as possible.

To explain why, let’s review an example of what a skills gap analysis may look like as you move beyond the startup phase. Imagine you work for a software company, and your dev team struggles to catch up with competitors when it comes to AI-assisted coding. After running an analysis, you also find that marketing doesn’t take advantage of AI for analytics-based insights, and support manually handles customer questions that could be resolved instantly with AI.

This review uncovered a wider issue: an organizational AI readiness gap that needs a coordinated response. Instead of focusing just on the engineering issue, you might take advantage of targeted AI upskilling programs, role redesigns, and strategic hiring to bring competency up to par across the board.

Addressing these kinds of systemic gaps can be challenging. You’ll need a tool like Leapsome to put what you learn into action, through targeted, data-backed learning programs and continuous feedback.

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🧑‍🏫 Close gaps faster with targeted learning
Leapsome integrates personalized learning paths with performance data, providing a clear and structured way for employees to close skill gaps.
👉 Explore Leapsome Learning

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How to conduct a skills gap analysis, in three steps

According to a 2025 LinkedIn Business report, 49% of L&D professionals say their executives feel employees don’t have the necessary skills to execute business strategies successfully. To fall on the right side of that divide, you’ll need a standardized, scalable process you can apply to the entire workforce.

Here’s what that looks like in action.

1. Outline critical skills that drive business goals

Start by asking this question: What skills do employees need to perform their roles now, and what capabilities will they need in the near future? Work with managers and employees to get a complete picture, and review performance feedback and self-assessments for insights. Then round out your list of skills by mining job ads and referencing long-term business goals.

2. Leverage data to understand current capabilities

“Good data helps us identify pain points early, plan development initiatives, and return to the business with clear, actionable insights.”
– Victor Tomas, Learning and Development Specialist at Swapfiets

Next, gather as much hard data as you can about your workforce’s existing capacities. Review performance KPIs and survey results, along with anything else that might add useful context. To get as much reliable data as possible during your skills gap analysis, leverage software like Leapsome to centralize employee information and keep records consistent.

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🖼️ Get a complete picture of workforce skills
Standardize definitions and organize assessment data, so you can back up your skills gap analysis with organization-wide visibility.
👉 Explore Leapsome’s Competency Framework

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3. Triage and address important skill gaps

Once you have all the information you need on hand, use the priority framework in the following section (or design your own) to rank skill gaps by severity. Deloitte Insights reports that the most successful organizations concentrate on carefully chosen, high-priority skills. So consider how time-sensitive each skill gap is, and how it impacts the company’s overall goals and performance. Prioritize from there.

“The most important metric is the performance of the company. Everything else — engagement, sentiment — should serve that.”
– Luck Dookchitra, former VP of People and Culture at Leapsome

With your skill gap analysis report in hand, you’re ready to take action. You might create targeted training programs for existing team members, or reconfigure roles to better match capabilities to needs. For best results, involve plenty of stakeholders in this process, and comprehensively track the results of your changes.

How to focus your analysis where it counts

Even with a structured process, small and mid-sized organizations often face too many skill gaps and struggle to prioritize. Working within an explicit priority framework cuts through the noise.

“Choose the levers that move the business forward, and let go of everything else. When you share your roadmap and explain your trade-offs, you build trust and credibility, and people start seeing HR as strategic, not reactive.”
– Emma Leeds, Founder, CEO, and Chief People Consultant at People Function

This quick framework will guide you toward the most impactful competencies, so you know what to target first:

• Business impact: Does this skill directly influence revenue, performance, or strategic goals? If so, it likely has high business impact.

• Role dependency: Which roles depend on this skill for successful execution? A capability that’s essential for a high-impact role is usually more critical than a skill only needed by junior team members.

• Urgency: What’s the cost of waiting to address this skill? A cybersecurity gap in a workforce that handles sensitive customer data may require immediate, direct intervention via internal training programs or outside hiring.

A skills gap analysis template

Following a checklist helps you structure skills gap analysis, so nothing falls through the cracks. We’ve put one together to get you started as well as a skills gap analysis worksheet to use with your employees.

☑️ Keep your skills gap analysis on track
Make the most of your next skills gap analysis with this easy-to-use template.
👉 Download the template

Turn skills gap analysis into a scalable, high-impact process with Leapsome

Identifying skill gaps is only half the battle. You need to figure out what’s lacking, but also decide which gaps to fill and in what order. This is difficult if you’re dealing with limited resources and fragmented data that shrouds workforce visibility. Without the right tools, you risk going from skills gap analysis straight to time-wasting development programs that don’t make much impact.

Leapsome combines HRIS and people strategy features, helping you standardize data collection and competency frameworks. This makes it easier to surface high-impact gaps, then connect them directly to learning and development. In other words, you’ll replace loose assessments with a direct, structured pipeline from skill gap identification to meaningful action.

“My primary goals were to build an ongoing feedback culture, improve conversations about performance, and better understand competencies across the company.” – Nadja Kaderli, People and Culture Manager

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💻 Get intelligent workforce planning tools
Unite employee skills data, then build targeted personal development plans to close gaps and strengthen your workforce.
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