What is a skills gap and how to close it

What is a skills gap?

A skills gap is the difference between the competencies an organization’s employees have and the ones that organization needs in order to operate properly. It becomes obvious the moment someone has to carry out a task and doesn’t have the skills to do it well: the work slips, it gets escalated upward, or it gets solved with a worse method than the one available.

This is neither a minor nor a marginal problem. In the U.S., 69% of employers report difficulty finding the skilled talent they need, according to ManpowerGroup’s 2026 Talent Shortage Survey of more than 6,000 U.S. employers — down only slightly from 71% the previous year. Worldwide the figure stands at 72%.

The distance between the skills professionals have and the ones they need to perform their role has grown steadily in recent years. It is a common phenomenon, but that doesn’t make it harmless: an undetected gap gets paid for in productivity, in projects that never get going and in talent that leaves because it sees no path forward.

This guide covers the three questions that matter: how big the gap really is and in which industries, how to identify the one in your company with an analysis you can actually run, and what to do with it once you have it in front of you.

An example of a skills gap

Let’s say a company adopts new AI-powered project management software to improve its efficiency. Its employees, however, don’t have the skills to make use of the predictive analytics or the workflow optimization, and prefer to carry on with the traditional methods they are familiar with.

What happens in that scenario? Employees cannot take advantage of the new software’s features because they don’t understand it or aren’t comfortable with the technology, the company loses the chance to improve its efficiency and productivity, and the door is left open to unnecessary errors and delays. The investment has been made; the return has not.

What a skills gap is not

It is worth separating it from two concepts it gets confused with daily, because each one is solved differently:

• It isn’t a talent shortage. A shortage is a market problem: the skills aren’t available out there. A gap is an internal problem: they exist in the market, just not in your workforce.
• It isn’t a performance problem. Someone who knows how to do something and doesn’t do it has a motivation, workload or management problem. Training them won’t fix it.

The distinction isn’t academic: mixing the two up leads to opening job searches when what was needed was training, or the other way round. If you want to sharpen the vocabulary, here is the difference between skills and competencies.

How big the gap really is: the 2026 data

The skills gap stopped being a theoretical concern a long time ago and became the main operational brake on companies. In the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025, 63% of employers name skills gaps as the main barrier to transforming their business between 2025 and 2030. Ahead of regulation, of funding and of technology.

That same report estimates that 39% of workers’ current skills will have been transformed or become outdated by 2030, and translates the problem into a scale you can take in at a glance:

Those 11 out of every 100 are the uncomfortable figure in the report: workers whose gap has been identified and for whom, even so, there will be no plan. In a 500-person workforce that is 55 employees at risk of being left out of the change. Putting that number on your own organization is usually the argument that unlocks a training budget.

The skills gap by industry

The aggregate figure makes the headline, but decisions get made by industry. ManpowerGroup’s 2026 Talent Shortage Survey, which interviewed 39,063 employers across 41 countries, breaks down what proportion of companies cannot fill their vacancies in each sector. These are the global figures:

In the U.S. specifically, the shortage concentrates in different places than the global picture suggests: operations and logistics roles are the hardest to fill, ahead of sales and marketing and of front-office and customer-facing positions, with AI literacy and engineering climbing fast. Globally, AI skills took the top spot as the scarcest for the first time.

On the human side, the skills U.S. employers name as most important and hardest to find are the combination of communication, collaboration and teamwork, professionalism and work ethic, critical thinking and problem-solving, and time management.

Why do skills gaps happen?

The software example highlights one of the most common causes: as new tools and technologies reach the market, the skills needed to handle them change too. Companies find that their people don’t adapt fast enough, especially if no resources have been invested in training them.

It isn’t the only factor. Demographic change also plays a part, when a portion of the workforce didn’t grow up with digital technology; so does the emergence of new areas of specialization that didn’t exist as such before; and the absence of an organizational culture that encourages continuous learning and gives people a reason to build new skills.

To those causes it is worth adding three that show up in almost every analysis and that the pace of recent years has made more visible:

• Turnover. When someone leaves, the gap doesn’t open gradually: it appears all at once, and it is usually the gap of the knowledge that was never documented.
• Business growth. Opening a market or launching a new line creates skill needs nobody had any reason to have the year before.
• Regulatory change. Sustainability, data protection or accessibility rules force competencies that were not required before.

Types of skills gaps

Leaving causes aside, gaps can show up in different ways within the same company, and each type has its own challenges:

Technical skills gaps

These refer to the lack of the specific knowledge needed to use tools, software or technologies related to the job. They range from operating machinery to programming or data analysis. They are the easiest to measure, because they are demonstrated by doing. You can go deeper into technical skills and into advanced digital skills.

Soft skills gaps

These involve interpersonal competencies such as effective communication, empathy or teamwork, essential in any workplace. They are the hardest to assess objectively and the most underestimated when planning training: the soft skills guide and the article on power skills set out how to tackle them.

Leadership skills gaps

These become obvious when managers lack the competencies needed to guide, motivate and handle conflict within their teams. They are especially damaging when the company faces market, technological or organizational change, because they multiply the effect of every other gap on the team.

Industry-specific skills gaps

These reflect the particular needs and trends of each industry. Every sector faces challenges that demand specific skills: the financial industry, for example, may be hit by a shortage of data analysis or cybersecurity experts.

How to identify skills gaps in your company

Gaps are identified through a process called a gap analysis. There are three steps, and each one has to end in a concrete deliverable: if you don’t have a document at the end of a step, you haven’t done it.

Step 1: Assess the key skills

Key skills are the competencies that matter to your company or industry and that can create growth opportunities. The first step is to identify them, assess them and align them with your strategic objectives. A good way to start is to build a list of all the critical skills your company needs now and in the near future.

Deliverable: a list of between 15 and 30 skills per job family, written as observable behaviors rather than as concepts. “Reads a dashboard and proposes an action” is useful; “data-driven mindset” is not.

Step 2: Measure your team’s current skills

The second step is measuring what you have. Surveys, self-assessments, performance reviews, interviews and check-ins all serve that purpose. The goal is to have a clear picture of each team member’s capabilities, with their strengths and their areas to work on.

Deliverable: a people-by-skills matrix with a level in each cell. Always cross-check self-assessment against a second source: self-perception on its own inflates average levels and will have you planning against the wrong map. Skills mapping and the skill graph are the two techniques that best organize this step.

Step 3: Compare current skills against the ones you need

You now know which skills your company needs and which ones your professionals have. Time to compare and make the existing gaps visible. Once identified, you can build an action plan, which may include both hiring new talent and training strategies.

Deliverable: the list of gaps with their size (how many people, how many levels of distance) and their business impact. Without those two columns you won’t be able to prioritize, and prioritizing is exactly what comes next.

Which gap to tackle first: a criticality matrix

Every honest analysis ends with more gaps than you can close in a year. The usual mistake is splitting the budget equally among all of them and fully closing none. Cross each gap against two variables — how much it affects the business and how expensive it is to cover from outside — and the priority sorts itself out:

5 effective strategies to close the skills gap

With priorities sorted, it is time to execute. These are the five strategies that work, with the nuance that almost never gets mentioned: when each one is appropriate and how long it takes to deliver.

Strategy 1: continuous learning

Continuous learning is one of the best ways to keep employees up to date with the skills your business objectives demand. It means offering regular programs covering both soft skills and technical skills through workshops, certifications, online courses or webinars that give people the tools to build their competencies.

When it applies: always, as the baseline. Timeframe: it is the slowest to show results and the only one that stops the gap from reopening. A role-based training plan is what turns it into a system rather than a catalog.

Strategy 2: using e-learning technology

E-learning technology opens the door to flexible training that adapts to different learning styles. These platforms let people access courses and materials anytime, anywhere, respond to specific needs by prioritizing key skills, and provide information on each professional’s progress.

When it applies: as soon as the gap affects more than one team or several locations. Timeframe: fast to roll out, but it demands measurement: LMS analytics is what separates training from entertainment.

Strategy 3: upskilling and reskilling

Upskilling and reskilling are two key strategies for closing gaps. Reskilling equips professionals to take on new roles within the company; upskilling improves their competencies so they can handle more complex tasks within their current role. Both let you make use of the talent you already have instead of depending on new hires, and they improve organizational culture by offering employees development opportunities that make them feel valued.

When it applies: when the gap is high impact and the profile is hard to find outside. Timeframe: three to twelve months depending on the distance between the starting point and the destination. Skills transformation explains how to plan the whole journey.

Strategy 4: strategic hiring

Strategic hiring means bringing in talent that not only covers current needs but fits your long-term objectives. It involves looking for people with specific technical skills and, on top of that, the ability to learn fast, adapt to change and contribute to the company’s growth and culture.

When it applies: when the gap blocks an objective with a deadline and there is no room to train. Timeframe: the fastest on paper and the most expensive in practice, especially in the sectors where seven out of ten companies are competing for the same profile.

Strategy 5: workforce planning

Workforce planning is the strategic approach to managing gaps, and it consists of anticipating the company’s future needs. It requires identifying critical roles, mapping employee development toward those roles and building succession plans, without losing sight of market trends so the plan can be adjusted when needed.

When it applies: it is the one that stops you being back here in two years. Timeframe: long, which is why it is usually the first to get postponed and the one whose postponement costs the most.

Train, hire or outsource: how to decide

The five strategies above come down, at the moment of truth, to a single question for each gap: do I cover it from within, buy it from outside, or move it out of the company’s perimeter altogether? These are the criteria that order the decision:

5 mistakes in a skills gap analysis

The analysis is the easy part. These five failures are what land the result in a drawer:

1. Confusing the gap with a talent shortage. If the skill doesn’t exist in the market, opening a search only burns months. That gap gets closed by training, not by looking.
2. Measuring with self-assessment alone. People with the least command of a skill tend to overrate themselves, and the experts do the opposite. Always cross-check against a second source.
3. Mapping skills that are no longer used. Many competency catalogs describe the job as it was five years ago. Before measuring, check that the list describes the role as it is today.
4. Leaving out the leadership gap. It is the most uncomfortable one to measure because it points upward, and the one that most multiplies the effect of all the others.
5. Doing it only once. An analysis with no review date is a snapshot. With 39% of skills changing between now and 2030, a snapshot expires in months.

There is a sixth mistake that belongs not to the analysis but to what comes after: not measuring the result. Cross-referencing the training delivered against employee performance is what tells you whether the gap genuinely closed or the budget merely got spent.

Case study: how AKRON Group drove upskilling and reskilling across its workforce

AKRON Group is a leading company in the lubricants and additives industry with a presence in South America, Central America and the United States. Innovation and the professional development of its employees sit in the DNA of its culture as one of its most important missions. That is why, together with isEazy, it launched a plan to transform its corporate training processes into an online model that would guarantee upskilling and reskilling for its 700-plus employees.

Read the case study and find out how they established quality e-learning, set specific learning paths by role and profile, and raised their engagement and completion rates.

Closing the skills gap? Reach your goals with isEazy Skills!

Closing a skills gap demands spotting it in time and having e-learning tools that let you deliver effective training programs. It also demands consistency: according to LinkedIn’s Workplace Learning Report 2025, offering learning opportunities is the number one retention strategy among the organizations surveyed, yet only 36% have genuinely mature development programs. The difference between the two groups isn’t intention, it’s the system.

Not sure where to start? Discover isEazy Skills, the most complete course catalog on the market, with more than 540 courses and programs to cover any training need, profile, role or industry. Drive your team’s skill development with agile, engaging courses available in a range of formats so they can access them wherever they are. So what are you waiting for to request a demo?