Skills gap analysis for HR and L&D teams

A skills gap analysis compares the skills your people have with the skills their roles, teams or planned work require. The output is a list of gaps, in an order that lets you decide what to train, what to hire and what to redeploy. It has three steps: define the skills a role requires, measure the skills people have, and compare the two. The measurement step is where the evidence is thinnest, because job titles and free-text profile fields say little about what a person can actually do. JobCannon supplies evidence for the first two steps: a knowledge graph that links skills to careers, for what a role draws on, and assessments, for what people report and what they can be tested on. The comparison across your organization, by department and against your own role definitions, is not a self-serve report today. It is scoped in a partnership engagement, and departments and roll-up views are being added to the cabinet.

Two ways, and the difference matters. The Skills Audit (55 questions, 12 min) is a self-assessment across technical skills, tools, soft skills and domain knowledge. It shows how people rate their own skills and gives each person a skills heat map and priority development areas. Scored skills tests for Excel, Python, SQL, JavaScript and computer literacy return a score by category, so for those skills the result is a test result rather than an opinion. Not every skill can be tested. For the rest, treat the Skills Audit as a starting point for a conversation between the employee and their manager, not as a proficiency rating.

The knowledge graph links 1,863 skills to 2,521 careers through 57,490 skill-to-career connections. A connection exists where the career profile names the skill, or where O*NET, the U.S. Department of Labor occupational database, rates the skill as important for the matching occupation. That gives you a documented starting profile for a role. It reflects documented occupations, not current demand or your own job postings, and it does not model relationships between skills such as prerequisites. Where your roles differ from the public definition, requirements are set against your own role definitions in a partnership engagement. That is not a self-serve setting today.

Not yet as a self-serve report. Today the organization cabinet lets HR invite employees, read per-person results and group summaries, and export to CSV or PDF, so the results for a group can be read together and analyzed in your own tools. A gap view by department, measured against your own role definitions, is scoped in a partnership engagement, where the reporting you need is agreed up front; departments and roll-up views are being added to the cabinet to support it.

Yes. Individuals can run a skills gap analysis for themselves, and two articles on this site explain how: Skills Gap Analysis for Personal Development, and Skills Gap Analysis: How to Identify and Close Career Skill Gaps. This page is about the organization-side version, where HR or L&D needs a view across many people and a way to act on it. Employees can also take the assessments on their own and bring the results to a development conversation.

No, and it should not be run as one. Results describe skills, not performance in the job, and a self-rating reflects how a person sees their own skills. Used as a development input, it gives the employee and the manager a shared, concrete starting point. Used to rank or rate people, it changes how honestly they answer. JobCannon does not produce performance ratings or promotion decisions. The same skills data supports internal talent mobility, moving people into roles that use their skills, and career pathing.