Discovering the Skills Gap

After carrying out the exercises of the analysis of the Skill Requirements and the Skills Base it is possible to discover if there is or is not a Skills Gap in the abilities of the group. This is arrived at by a simple difference technique on the two sets of data. 

Skills Requirements - Skills Base (current) = Skills Gap 

To show how the methods to derive the Skills Gap are used, let us consider the case of an R D Manager whose job includes running a team working on bioactive materials for industrial type applications. 

The plan for the coming year requires that work be done on four separate projects. The total budget that has been agreed with the Business Manager allows for nine people to be allocated across the portfolio of projects. The agreed allocation of the nine people to each project is as shown in Table A3. 

Project A involves the synthesis of novel biologically active materials for testing in the preservation of the latex used in the manufacture of paint. From past experience, it is known that the chemicals that are likely to be active in this environment will be those based on heterocycles containing sulphur. Therefore for this Project the particular Skill Requirement is the ability to design and synthesise sulphur-containing heterocycles that will show bioactivity in this industrial outlet. The two people who will be required for this task are available in the cur- 

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