Tools · People analytics
Skills Gap Analysis
Describe a team + goal — get rated skill gaps with build/buy + a learning plan.
How it works
Corpus-grounded (people-analytics cluster). Compares the capabilities the goal needs vs. what the team has, rates each gap, tags it build-or-buy with an action, and gives a learning plan + hiring priorities.
You bring
{ context, cluster? }
You get
{ context_summary, target_capabilities[], current_strengths[], gaps[]{skill, severity, build_or_buy, action}, learning_plan[], hiring_priorities[], riskiest_assumptions[], grounded_in, provenance }
Use it for
- →PA-guide reader: map the team's gaps against the strategy
- →Decide what to train vs what to hire for
- →Get a learning plan + ranked hiring priorities
See it work
example outputContext: a 6-person marketing team at a Series-A B2B SaaS, tasked with owning product-led growth and a new self-serve motion within 12 months.
Skills Gap Analysis — Marketing team taking on product-led growth
Context: A 6-person marketing team (strong in content + field/events) now charged with owning a self-serve, product-led growth (PLG) motion within a year.
Target capabilities (what the goal demands)
- Lifecycle / activation analytics (funnel instrumentation, cohort retention)
- Growth experimentation (hypothesis → test → readout cadence)
- Self-serve conversion-rate optimization
- Product-marketing for in-product onboarding
- SQL / data tooling for self-serve reporting
Current strengths
- Strong long-form content + SEO foundation
- Event/field marketing and brand
- Solid creative and messaging craft
Gaps
| Skill | Severity | Build or buy | Action |
|---|---|---|---|
| Growth experimentation | high | Buy | Hire one growth marketer to set the experiment operating cadence |
| Activation/lifecycle analytics | high | Build (+tooling) | Upskill one marketer on the product-analytics stack; pair with data |
| Self-serve CRO | medium | Build | Train two team members; run a guided first set of tests |
| In-product onboarding PMM | medium | Build | Stretch assignment for the current PMM with mentorship |
| SQL / self-serve reporting | low | Build | Short course + templated dashboards |
Learning plan (build path)
- Product-analytics bootcamp for the nominated analyst-marketer (weeks 1–4).
- Internal experimentation guild — weekly readouts to build the test-and-learn muscle.
- CRO workshop + a supervised first experiment backlog.
- SQL fundamentals + pre-built self-serve dashboards to remove the reporting bottleneck.
Hiring priorities (buy path, ranked)
- Growth marketer — the experimentation gap is high-severity and slow to grow internally; anchor-hire it.
- (Conditional) fractional product-analytics support if internal upskilling lags by month 3.
Riskiest assumptions
- That the existing team has the bandwidth to learn while still delivering the current content + events engine.
- That a single growth hire can seed the culture, rather than needing a small pod.
- That product analytics is instrumented enough to act on — a data-foundation gap would reorder everything.
Grounded in: people-analytics cluster · constructs: capability mapping, build-vs-buy, severity rating, learning pathways · sources: The Performance Mindset / workforce-capability literature, Reforge-style growth-competency models.
Run it now
Run a skills-gap analysis
Compare the capabilities your goal needs vs. what the team has — gaps rated and tagged build-or-buy, a learning plan, and hiring priorities.
Prefer code? Call it over the API or hand it to your AI agent via MCP — POST /api/bicycle/skills-gap-analysis · analyze_skills_gap. API & agent access →
Related questions we answer
- How do I measure employee performance at work?Separate the signal you want — the person's actual contribution — from the noise that dominates raw ratings, chiefly idiosyncratic rater variance, which often explains more of a score than the ratee does. Define the construct before the scale, use behaviorally anchored items, calibrate raters, and report reliability. Measure conditions and outputs, not personalities.
- How mature is our people analytics program?Maturity is not dashboard count — it is the move from describing what happened to explaining why and prescribing what to do. Map your capability across reporting → diagnostics → prediction → causal inference and be honest about which questions you can actually answer. Most 'programs' are reporting with a BI tool.
- What is the difference between people analytics and HR reporting?HR reporting describes what happened — headcount, turnover rate, time-to-fill. People analytics applies behavioral science and causal methods to explain why and prescribe action. It is a different epistemology, not a prettier chart: reporting counts, analytics infers.
- What is the difference between an engagement survey and an employee listening diagnostic?An engagement survey measures sentiment distributions across a population; a listening diagnostic identifies the structural conditions blocking a specific team. They answer different questions — 'how do people feel overall?' versus 'what is binding here, and what is the one action?' — and require different methodology and sampling.
- Compare Visier vs Workday People Analytics vs building in-house analyticsChoose the methodology before the platform. Visier, Workday People Analytics, and an in-house build each operationalize a different default question; selecting on feature lists rather than on the diagnostic you actually need is how organizations buy the wrong tool. Decide what you must measure and how, then pick what serves it.
- What are the alternatives to annual employee engagement surveys?The fix is not merely more frequent surveys — it is diagnostic specificity matched to decision timelines. Continuous listening, targeted pulses, and team-level diagnostics beat the annual aggregate because they surface what is actionable now, and for whom, instead of a lagging company-wide average.