A training gap is the difference between the skills employees currently possess and the competencies required to meet organizational goals or perform specific tasks. Identifying these gaps is critical because unaddressed skill shortages directly undermine productivity, introduce compliance risks, slow down adoption of new technologies, and inflate onboarding costs.
In 2023, the World Economic Forum revealed that 44% of workers’ core skills were already expected to be disrupted within the next five years: a clear signal of how rapidly capabilities are evolving. At the same time, six in ten employees will require training by 2027, yet many organizations lack adequate learning infrastructure to keep pace.
For L&D leaders, proactively identifying training gaps is not optional, it’s essential. Without a structured approach, you risk investing in the wrong areas or delivering training that doesn’t move the needle. Addressing this challenge helps ensure that learning investments accelerate performance, drive adoption, and align with fast-changing business needs.
In this guide, we offer a consistent strategy for uncovering and addressing employee training gaps in your organization and understand how Whatfix enables dynamic, in-the-flow interventions that close gaps faster and smarter..
What Are Training Gaps?
A training gap is the difference between the skills and knowledge employees currently have and the competencies required to perform their roles successfully. Closing these gaps ensures the workforce can meet business goals, adapt to change, and operate at full effectiveness.
Training gaps often appear when organizations introduce new technologies, evolve business processes, or fail to provide adequate development opportunities. The existence of gaps isn’t inherently negative, it’s a signal for L&D leaders to take action. By identifying where skills are missing, organizations can design targeted training strategies that strengthen capabilities, improve performance, and build a more resilient workforce.
How to Analyze and Identify Training Gaps In Your Workplace
The process of identifying skills gaps is called a training needs assessment. Here’s how you perform it.
1. Set learning objectives and outcomes
Before you begin, think of what makes you run this analysis. What goals are you trying to achieve by offering your employees relevant training?
Understanding the purpose will provide focus and direction to your analysis.
Clearly define the reasons for conducting the training needs assessment. For instance, you may want to identify the reasons behind poor employee performance, address specific organizational challenges, or adopt new business software.
2. Determine the skills or knowledge you need
What knowledge, skills, or competencies does your team or organization need to achieve the goal you’ve just specified?
Create a competency model that lists all the soft and hard skills it will take to perform the task successfully. Determine desired proficiency levels for each skill. This will be a benchmark you’ll be comparing your employees’ skill sets against.
Follow these tips to benchmark the proficiency levels:
- Categorize the skills based on their relevance to the goal. For example, if you’re aiming to enhance customer service, you may identify categories such as communication skills, problem-solving skills, and product knowledge and make them focal points within your customer service training.
- Consider the skills that are crucial for successful job performance and prioritize them accordingly.
- Define the desired proficiency levels for each skill category. You can do it by using descriptive labels that indicate different levels of proficiency, such as beginner, intermediate, advanced, or using a numerical scale from 1 to 10.
3. Communicate the purpose of assessments to employees
To make sure your employees aren’t enticed to overestimate their skills during the assessment process, make it clear why you’re performing this evaluation.
Clearly convey that the assessment is not designed to “weed out” or negatively evaluate their performance. Instead, highlight that the purpose is to identify employee development areas where additional support and training can be provided.
4. Break down skills based on jobs and teams
You should align the assessment process with specific job roles and team responsibilities, ensuring that the skills being assessed are relevant and tailored to each group.
If you’re running an organization-wide assessment process, you’ll most likely need different skill proficiency levels from different roles. Within each job role or team, prioritize the required skills based on their importance and relevance to the job responsibilities.
Outline the specific expectations and criteria for each proficiency level. For example, if the skill is “customer service,” you would determine what it means to be at a basic level, an intermediate level, or an advanced level in customer service.
5. Create a proficiency scoring system
Determine the rating scale that you will use to assess and score employees’ skills. This could be a numerical scale (e.g., 1 to 10) or descriptive labels (e.g., Novice, Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced).
For each proficiency level, establish clear criteria that define what it means to achieve that level of proficiency. Refer back to the expectations and criteria outlined in the previous step.
6. Assess employee skills
It’s time to assess the current skill levels of your employees. You’ll need to combine the data from a range of assessments to create a reliable data set:
- Collect employee feedback. Use surveys and questionnaires to collect insights into employees’ self-perception of their skills and knowledge.
- Run assessment tests. Develop tests or quizzes that evaluate employees’ understanding and proficiency in specific areas.
- Offer practical assessments. Design tasks or simulations that allow employees to showcase their abilities in a real or simulated work environment.
- Conduct 360-degree reviews. Gather feedback from people an employee interacts with.
Analyze individual assessments to understand each employee’s strengths and areas for improvement. Consolidate the data on all the skills and knowledge your employees have, making notes on the current proficiency levels and the number of employees that have specific capabilities.
7. Plot your data in a skills matrix
A skills matrix visually represents the proficiency levels of employees in different skills or competencies, allowing you to identify skill gaps and prioritize training needs. Here’s how you build and analyze it:
- List the skills you’re looking for in your organization (see step 2) on one axis and the employees’ names or identifiers on the other axis.
- Fill in the skill matrix with the proficiency levels obtained from the assessments conducted in step 6.
- Identify areas where there are significant gaps between the desired proficiency levels (benchmark) and the actual proficiency levels of your employees.
By plotting the data in a skill matrix, you can visualize the distribution of skills within your team or organization. Based on the proficiency level benchmarks, identify specific areas that require attention.
Get a customizable copy of our Skill Will Matrix template now!
✓ Thank you, the checklist will be sent to your email
8. Prioritize training needs
You’ve most likely identified more than one skill gap, what should you do now?
You should determine which areas require immediate attention and focus based on their impact on business goals, employee performance, and organizational priorities.
This is a simple framework for prioritizing your training needs:
- Evaluate the significance of each skill gap in relation to your goal. Some skill gaps will have a more significant impact on performance, productivity, or the ability to achieve desired outcomes than others.
- Group related skills. Identify common themes or areas where multiple employees show proficiency gaps.
- Consider both immediate and long-term training needs. Some skills may require urgent attention due to their impact on ongoing projects or immediate business demands, while others may be more strategic in nature, contributing to long-term organizational growth.
- Evaluate the availability of resources, including budget, time, and expertise, to support training initiatives. Prioritize the training needs that you can address with the available resources.
- Compile a list of the prioritized training needs, ranking them in order of importance or urgency.
How to Address and Overcome Training Gaps
Identifying training gaps is only the first step. The real challenge for L&D leaders and business application owners is translating those insights into targeted, scalable interventions that strengthen skills without disrupting workflows. Addressing gaps effectively requires a combination of smart planning, the right technology, and ongoing measurement.
1. Build a targeted training plan
Start by defining the exact skills or behaviors employees need to improve. Then design a plan that maps those needs to the most effective training methods. Consider:
- Delivery methods: Blend workshops, microlearning, and in-app training based on employee preferences and the complexity of the skill.
- Timing and access: Decide whether learning will occur during work hours or asynchronously.
- Budget and efficiency: Balance cost with expected impact by reusing existing resources where possible.
- Evaluation: Establish how success will be measured (e.g., pre- and post-training assessments, observed behavior changes, or productivity metrics).
For new hires, this may mean weaving targeted modules into onboarding flows. For existing employees, it could mean layering role-specific reinforcement into their daily tools.
2. Leverage the right technologies
Manual training approaches are no longer sufficient for enterprise needs. L&D teams need platforms that can deliver training at scale, in context, and with measurable outcomes. Common categories include:
- Learning Management Systems (LMS): Centralize formal courses, compliance training, and completion tracking.
- Knowledge management systems: Provide searchable access to process documents, SOPs, and policies.
- Microlearning platforms: Deliver short, focused lessons that fit into busy schedules.
- Digital adoption platforms (DAPs): With Whatfix, enterprises go beyond static training by embedding interactive walkthroughs, task lists, smart tips, and self-help resources directly inside applications. Whatfix Mirror even allows employees to practice in safe, simulated environments before applying skills in production systems. This ensures training gaps are closed in the flow of work, not weeks later in a classroom.
→ Guide users through complex apps with contextual, role-based in-app guidance.
→ Support users at the moment of need with AI-powered Self Help and embedded workflow assistance.
→ Analyze user engagement to identify friction points and optimize business processes.
3. Monitor progress and optimize continuously
Closing training gaps is not a one-time exercise. Continuous monitoring helps ensure that interventions translate into real performance improvement.
- Use LMS reports, HR data, and DAP Guidance Analytics to track how employees engage with training content and whether they successfully complete key tasks.
- Run pre- and post-training assessments to quantify improvements.
- Collect feedback from employees to identify what’s working and where they still struggle.
- Whatfix makes this process data-driven by providing visibility into user behavior inside applications, highlighting where employees hesitate, abandon tasks, or repeatedly request support. This insight allows L&D leaders to refine interventions and ensure training investments deliver measurable ROI.
Frequently Asked Questions
What causes training gaps in the workplace?
Training gaps typically arise from new technology rollouts, evolving business requirements, insufficient onboarding, changes in compliance standards, or a lack of ongoing skill development opportunities.
What is the difference between a training gap and a skills gap?
A training gap refers specifically to areas where employees need additional learning or practice to meet performance expectations. A skills gap is broader, it includes missing capabilities that may not be solved through training alone and could require hiring, process changes, or new tools.
How can organizations identify training gaps effectively?
Common methods include conducting skill gap analyses, running employee surveys, evaluating performance data, using a competency matrix, and analyzing workflow data through digital adoption platforms like Whatfix to detect where employees struggle with tools or processes.
How often should training gaps be assessed?
Training gaps should be reassessed at least annually and whenever there are major organizational changes such as software adoption, new regulatory requirements, or shifts in business strategy.
How can L&D leaders close training gaps without disrupting workflows?
Blended strategies work best: combine microlearning, mentoring, and formal training with in-app support. Digital adoption platforms like Whatfix embed guidance and self-help directly into applications, allowing employees to learn in the flow of work while staying productive.
How do you measure whether training gaps have been closed?
Organizations can track progress with pre- and post-training assessments, performance metrics, employee feedback, and adoption analytics. Frameworks such as Kirkpatrick’s four levels of evaluation are commonly used to measure reaction, learning, behavior, and business outcomes.
Training Clicks Better With Whatfix
Identifying training gaps is only valuable if organizations can act on them quickly and effectively. For L&D leaders, HR teams, and application owners, the challenge is not just finding where employees struggle, it’s providing support at the moment of need, without pulling them away from their work.
Whatfix bridges this gap by embedding guidance, walkthroughs, self-help, and simulated practice directly into the tools employees use every day. The result is a workforce that learns continuously, adapts faster, and drives measurable business outcomes.
Bridge skills gaps faster with in-the-flow training and support. Request a Whatfix demo today.
