Finding the right person for the job can feel like assembling the Avengers — with half the data and none of the drama. It’s about figuring out who has the superpowers (skills!) you need and who might need a bit of a training montage. That’s where skill gap analysis steps in — a total game-changer for any organization aiming to boost its business performance.
At its core, a skills gap is the discrepancy between the abilities your employees currently possess and the ones your organization needs to hit its strategic objectives. This isn't just about what they can do, but comparing their employee's actual skill level against the desired skill for specific roles or upcoming projects. This can include everything from hard skills like coding or data analysis to crucial soft skills like communication, problem-solving, and critical thinking.
Within Jira, ActivityTimeline fills the visibility gap by turning project plans into real-time availability, skill capacity planning, and role dashboards. Want to know who’s free, who’s overbooked, and who’s got the Java chops to fix that broken microservice? You’ll see it in seconds, turning what used to be a frantic search into a simple click.
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Critical Skills Assessment: What Truly Drives Your Business?
Which skills truly move the needle in your business? Whether it’s specialized technical know-how or essential soft skills like communication and collaboration, you need to identify what’s truly critical for success. This is about pinpointing the skills that directly impact your business outcomes and your ability to gain a competitive edge. This helps organizations pinpoint where employees lack the necessary skills for specific roles.
ActivityTimeline allows you to create a day/week/month view of who’s available and skilled enough to be dropped into high-stakes work. This is crucial for rapid response and making sure you have the right skills when you need them most, especially for unexpected critical tasks.
Tag team members with custom skills in ActivityTimeline and assess their availability in context — across time, team, and project. This helps you understand where your existing skills lie and how they align with business priorities. Within ActivityTimeline application you can assign different skills to your users and also specify the proficiency level of these skills for your users. It gives you the possibility to easily see what skillset your users have and whether you have enough resources to complete certain projects.
You can manage skills in Configuration → Users → Skills & Tags:
Then, manage skills and proficiency levels in Configuration → Users → Skills & Tags / Proficiency Levels. There you can also create new Proficiency levels, that could later be associated with your users.
When assigning skills to new users, you can specify their proficiency level in that specific skill. Additionally, you can also assign skills directly to users on the ‘Users’ tab, by simply typic a new or existing skill name in the tab and later choosing the appropriate proficiency level.
Identifying Skills Gaps
Before you can plug those gaps, you need to find them. This means thoroughly evaluating your team’s current employee competencies and comparing them against the specific skills required for ongoing work and, crucially, future demands. Think of it as a strategic audit, relying on performance reviews, direct feedback, and hard data to get an accurate picture.
For searching for gaps, you will need a Skill Availability Report. This report is your quick glance at how many people with a particular skill (e.g., SQL, design, management) are available over time. It immediately flags if you're facing a skills shortage in a critical area. For example, if you see only one person available with strong Python skills for a new AI initiative, you know you have a potential bottleneck.
Then, try generating a Skill/Level Availability Report. This goes a step further by showing not just availability, but proficiency level — so you’re not assigning beginners to critical tasks. No more guessing if someone’s a true expert or just dabbled a bit! This is particularly useful when assessing complex skill levels and ensuring the right person is on the job.
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Conducting a Skills Gap Analysis: A Structured Approach
Once you’ve mapped out what’s missing, you’ll want a repeatable, structured process to fix it. This is all about matching supply (your workforce's current capabilities) to demand (project needs and future goals). According to industry experts, a structured skills gap analysis template or process typically involves defining roles, assessing current skills, analyzing the data, and developing a strategy.
Let’s see how ActivityTimeline can empower your gap analysis process.
Apart from Jira issues, ActivityTimeline JIRA add-on allows the creation of different types of custom events to manage your resources. Use Custom Events (like Placeholder Events or Bookings) to simulate assignments based on hypothetical needs. This is fantastic for “what if” scenarios, helping you plan for upcoming project needs without committing resources. You can test different team configurations and see their impact on delivery.
Above that, you can filter team capacity by project, type, and skill using Timeline Filters, so you only see what’s relevant for the analysis. This allows you to really hone in on specific areas to ensure you have the right skills in the right place to achieve business goals.
Use Position Availability Reports to plan across teams and roles. This gives you a bird’s-eye view of your entire organization’s skill landscape, aiding in strategic workforce planning.
One often overlooked, yet incredibly valuable, approach is analyzing bottlenecks in the context of skill-based (functional) teams. Many organizations structure teams around specific skills — for example, a frontend development team, a QA team, or a data analytics group. In ActivityTimeline, you can create functional teams based on skillsets and then use the Team Capacity Chart to visualize capacity and spot potential issues.
If you notice columns in the chart rising above the blue capacity line, that’s a red flag — a clear indicator of a potential bottleneck within that specific skill-based team. This allows you to take targeted action, such as reallocating tasks or prioritizing upskilling efforts for that particular function.
This visualization helps you not just to plan for projects, but to actively manage and rebalance workloads within specialized functions, preventing overload and underutilization.
Competitive Advantage: Outpacing the Competition
Want a team that moves faster than the competition? Then you need to close skill gaps before they derail delivery. Skill gap analysis important isn’t just about filling vacancies; it’s a strategic approach to staying sharp and fostering innovation. By addressing skill gaps, organizations can improve their overall efficiency and productivity, directly supporting business strategy.
How can ActivityTimeline help to streamline teams:
- See skill-based bottlenecks before they slow you down. This helps you maintain your competitive advantage by preventing delays and ensuring smooth project flow.
- Reallocate or train based on availability + skill level instead of guessing. This optimizes your employee development and makes your training programs far more effective, ensuring resources are targeted where they’re most needed.
- Use Skill/Level Availability views to benchmark teams and spot future stars. This helps you identify individuals with high potential and invest in their growth for long-term strategic advantage.
Overcoming Challenges: Centralizing Your Data
You’ve got 99 problems, and limited visibility often tops the list. Many organizations struggle with fragmented skill data, trapped in scattered spreadsheets or siloed departments. This often leads to training and development programs that feel reactive, not strategic, without a clear direction for employee development.
ActivityTimeline directly tackles these hurdles. It lets you centralize skill data inside Jira, eliminating the headaches of disparate data sources and providing a single, reliable source of truth for identifying gaps. Imagine being able to simulate workload shifts using Custom Booking Events to test how staffing changes might affect delivery. This allows you to make proactive decisions rather than reactive ones, effectively letting you "try before you buy" with personnel changes. Furthermore, ActivityTimeline automatically highlights low-capacity areas with its built-in reporting tools, quickly drawing attention to where you need to focus your efforts in developing your skills employees to prevent future skills shortage.
The Role of HR: A Strategic Partner in Workforce Development
HR’s role extends far beyond hiring and onboarding; they are strategic players in comprehensive workforce development. Skill gap analysis helps HR professionals design smarter training programs, guide effective recruitment strategies, and empower managers with concrete data. When employees feel their skills are being utilized effectively, they are far more likely to be engaged and remain with the organization, significantly boosting employee satisfaction and retention.
With ActivityTimeline, HR gains powerful tools. They can easily run Position & Skill Reports to pinpoint which teams or departments are most in need of upskilling, directly informing tailored development programs and the creation of targeted training materials and training sessions. The platform also allows HR to track long-term trends in workforce capacity to shape robust internal mobility programs. This strategic insight goes beyond the immediate hiring process, focusing instead on nurturing your existing employees for future roles and genuinely supporting their employee development. By collaborating with project leads through shared dashboards and filters, HR can foster a stronger partnership with operational teams, ensuring a truly cohesive approach to strategic workforce planning.
Wrapping Up
Skill gap analysis isn't about just checking boxes — it’s about building high-performing teams fast, ensuring you have the right skills at the right time. ActivityTimeline takes the guesswork out of staffing and lets you build the perfect task force in minutes, not days, allowing you to constantly evaluate and address skills gaps for a truly dynamic and competitive organization.
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