Working with your employees to plan their career paths in the months and years ahead is a great way to boost employee engagement, speed up workforce development, increase retention, and ensure your company has the skills it needs to flourish.
However, significant skills gaps can derail even the most well-planned career paths and engaged employees. With the right resources and support, an employee with a quality career path can close some of these gaps. But when competency issues are too challenging, the employee learning and development required for a career path to become a reality can’t happen. Your career planning efforts go to waste, causing disengagement and encouraging the employee to look for their next opportunity outside the company.
Effective career paths and high skill levels depend on each other. For a career path to progress, skill levels need to be high, but to close workforce skills gaps, you need the engagement and targeted goals that career paths provide. This article will untie these interdependencies and explain the importance of closing your skills gaps when implementing career paths. We’ll also give a basic framework for identifying and closing these gaps effectively, setting your company up for future success and employee growth.
why skills gaps need to be closed for a good career pathing.
- Advancing employee knowledge — Whether an employee moves upwards, sideways or diagonally in the company hierarchy as they progress on their career path, they always need to expand their knowledge and skills. Moving upwards usually requires the employee to develop their leadership and delegation skills, while a sideways or diagonal move means they need to focus on building their specialisation. Skills and knowledge are the foundation of progress — and skills gaps can bring progress to a stop. Get a head start with our in-demand skills research and find out which key skills your company will be competing on in the near future.
- Collaborative peer learning is key — In many cases, guidance from colleagues is the key source of skills development. By working with more experienced colleagues or solving problems together with people from across the company, practical skills and specialised knowledge build up over time. According to Harvard Business Review, this kind of coaching is one of the key ways companies are working to close their skills gaps today. However, if skills are lacking across the company, peer learning opportunities will be limited and the employee’s planned career path will stall.
- Skills gaps affect retention — Employees who don’t feel they are developing their skills and gaining knowledge at work are more likely to leave the company. According to figures from our 2025 Workmonitor survey, 71% of UK workers see training and development as an essential factor in their current or future job role. If development opportunities aren’t available and they decide to look for work elsewhere, their planned career path at your company won’t become a reality.
Effective career paths rely on employees being willing to stay at the company for the foreseeable future. If they become dissatisfied with the lack of skills and learning opportunities, their career paths will be cut short.
how developing career paths can help close your skills gaps.
Implementing a general upskilling plan across the company may seem the most impactful way to close your skills and competency gaps. However, one-size-fits-all approaches don’t account for employees’ unique interests and goals, affecting their level of engagement and making it less likely that the upskilling plan will lead to real change.
Career pathing, on the other hand, requires a more tailored approach, as we offer in our talent life cycle solutions. In a compelling career path, skills goals are adapted to the employee’s biggest strengths, personal goals and passions. This gives them a personal investment in their future and boosts engagement significantly, making it more likely they will play an active part in their learning and skills development. As Forbes puts it, career pathing “engages, motivates and retains talent, but it also fills skills gaps and prepares businesses for growth.”
Rather than pushing employees to develop skills they’re not interested in, career paths help you focus on developing truly relevant skills to the highest possible level.
Developing individual career paths instead of setting a company-wide skills policy is more time-consuming, and many large companies find it challenging to scale. However, as MIT Sloan Management Review describes, helping every employee chart a career path is feasible and can be hugely effective.
Regardless of the scale of your career pathing initiatives, a few highly engaged employees working on key skills they feel passionate about can significantly improve engagement, morale and performance across the company. Investing in a small group of key change-makers with career pathing can make a big difference and create an engagement and knowledge boost that spreads to other areas of the organisation.
how to identify skill gaps.
Identifying all the skills gaps negatively impacting your company is never easy. Some gaps may be obvious, especially if they’re causing apparent problems in your daily operations. But others may be harder to identify. You may not even notice that some gaps exist, even while they create daily challenges that employees have to deal with. To uncover your key skills gaps, you need to take a broader perspective — deciding where you want to be tomorrow, looking at where you are today, and assessing what skills you need to make progress. Get started with these steps:
- Identify your key skills for the future — These skills will be needed to meet tomorrow’s challenges and ensure your company’s success and survival in the months and years ahead. They could be focused on developing skills in emerging technologies, such as AI and generative AI, or improving existing capabilities, such as sales or service performance.
- Assess your skill levels today — Looking at your key future skills, honestly assess where you are today. Is your team already competent in some of the most important skills? That’s good news, but you still need to work to maintain or develop these skills. Is experience lacking in some of the skills? If so, you’ve uncovered your skills gaps. It’s now time to start thinking about how you will address them.
- Plan your next steps — It can be a good idea to start with the biggest gaps between your current capabilities and future requirements. Now is the time to start pulling together stakeholders from across the company, like HR, management, and the relevant departments where the skills will be needed. With these focus areas, you can develop a targeted learning and development plan to close the gaps. Compared to a generic skills approach aimed at the whole company, this strategy will likely be more impactful. Learning and development takes many forms, but working on career pathing with members of the affected teams will help boost engagement in the strategy and close the gaps quicker.
get the skills gap analysis template.
Our skills gap analysis template is a ready-made resource to help you through the skills assessment process. It’s in Excel format and allows you to identify your future required skills, measure your current capabilities, and calculate the gap between them, helping you quickly prioritise the skills that require the most attention. Complete the template with colleagues from across the company with the right level of insight and get a useful foundational document that can be used throughout the skills development process that will follow.
