Accelerated Innovation

Assessing and Closing GenAI Skill Gaps

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Assessing and Closing GenAI Skill Gaps

Description

Assessing and closing GenAI skill gaps helps organizations understand their current capabilities and target upskilling efforts where they matter most. This capability focuses on identifying critical skill gaps across roles, teams, or functions, and systematically closing them through training, hiring, or workflow redesign.

Why it's Important

Many teams are eager to adopt GenAI, but lack a clear picture of what skills are missing or how to close those gaps. Without visibility into current and target state capabilities, learning efforts become generic or misaligned. This leads to wasted resources, inconsistent performance, and slower GenAI adoption. By taking a structured approach to skill gap assessment, organizations can tailor enablement, prioritize investments, and track progress over time. It also enables better workforce planning and helps prevent talent bottlenecks in critical initiatives.

Why it's Challenging @ Scale

  • No Clear GenAI Skill Taxonomy: Most organizations haven’t defined which GenAI skills matter-making assessments inconsistent or incomplete.
  • Lack of Role-Level Skill Expectations: Without defined expectations, it’s difficult to know what “good” looks like in each job.
  • Limited Assessment Tools or Data: Surveys and self-assessments often lack depth or reliability for GenAI-specific skills.
  • Gaps Can Be Political or Sensitive: Publicizing capability gaps may trigger defensiveness or fear, slowing progress.
  • Enablement Isn’t Always Targeted to Gaps: Many training programs are generic or voluntary, missing the people who need it most.

Complexity

High: Maturing this capability requires skill frameworks, assessment methods, data infrastructure, and stakeholder buy-in across HR, L&D, and business teams.

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Taking Action

Though most organizations begin their GenAI journey with significant knowledge gaps, there are targeted actions that can be taken to accelerate the process. Select your group’s current maturity, based on your assessment results, and act today.

The most important part of any journey is starting… To move from “Exploring” to “Experimenting”, focus on the following key actions:
  • Explore Key Concepts & Best Practices: Complete the Enterprise GenAI Talent Best Practices workshop (2 hrs.) to understand foundational key concepts and explore applied best practices.:
  • Identifying skills and capabilities needed for GenAI success.
  • Defining GenAI-specific roles and responsibilities.
  • Planning onboarding and upskilling programs.
  • Evaluating current talent gaps and readiness.
  • Building talent strategies aligned with GenAI roadmap.
  • Define Your Action Plan: Outline concrete, prioritized steps your organization will take to implement GenAI Strategy.:
  • Align on your Current State and define your Target State.
  • Create an actionable enablement plan.
  • Define target timeline and measures of success.
  • Deliver Quick Wins: Small, high-impact GenAI projects that can demonstrate tangible value in a short time frame.:
  • Select Pilot Teams for Skill Gap Discovery: Choose functions experimenting with GenAI to test gap-assessment tools.
  • Draft GenAI Skill Expectations by Role: Identify 5-7 core capabilities each role should demonstrate.
  • Run Self-Assessment or Manager Ratings: Use lightweight, directional assessments to test early frameworks and surface initial trends.
To move from Experimentation to “Lifting-Off”, prioritize the following actions:
  • Complete one or more of our Deep Dive Courses: Begin exploring key concepts and best practices, including::
  • AI Awareness & Literacy Enablement Best Practices
  • Defining Your AI Job Family
  • Role-Based GenAI Skill Acceleration Best Practices
  • GenAI Talent Management (Brand, Recruiting, Retention, Performance Management, & 3rd Party Management) Best Practices
  • Nail It Before You Scale It: Assess and optimize your solution or process before adopting it at scale:
  • Assess Your Proposed Solution or Process: Validate the usefulness and fairness of your gap identification methods through stakeholder feedback.
  • Define in-scope Processes and Guardrails: Clarify how assessments are used, where data is stored, and who owns closing the gaps.
  • Close any Data or Measurement Gaps: Build dashboards that show skills by role or team, and track progress over time.
  • Define Your Adoption & Scaling Plan: Create a structured roadmap for how GenAI solutions will be rolled out across teams, workflows, or business units:
  • Define Your Phased Implementation Plan: Roll out assessments and gap closure plans team by team, starting with high-impact roles.
  • Build Awareness and Finalize Enablers: Provide teams with clear instructions, tools, and messaging around “why this matters.”
  • Operationalize Your Comms Plan: Normalize conversations around skill gaps by focusing on growth-not judgment.
To move from Lifting-Off to “Accelerating”, prioritize the following actions:
  • Formalize Your Best Practices: Document and standardize what’s working to ensure consistent, scalable success across teams and use cases:
  • Publish a GenAI Skill Gap Assessment Framework: Include role-level capabilities, sample assessment questions, and rating guidance.
  • Integrate Gap Identification With Development Planning: Ensure assessments inform coaching, training, and advancement pathways.
  • Establish Governance for Skill Taxonomy Updates: Keep capabilities relevant as tools, policies, and roles evolve.
  • Accelerate Your Adoption: Intensify efforts to embed GenAI across your organization by expanding use cases, increasing user engagement, and removing adoption barriers:
  • Expand Skill Mapping Across Functions: Ensure consistency across technical, business, and support teams.
  • Incorporate Manager and Peer Assessments: Enable 360-style reviews to improve reliability and trust in results.
  • Link Enablement to Identified Gaps: Create modular learning pathways aligned with top priority gaps by role.
  • Celebrate Your Wins: Publicly acknowledge team accomplishments to build and sustain adoption momentum:
  • Share Before-and-After Capability Improvements: Highlight skill gains that made a real difference in performance or adoption.
  • Recognize Teams Who Took Action on Gaps: Showcase proactive learning cultures across the business.
  • Report Enterprise Readiness Progress to Leadership: Use visuals to show narrowing gaps and improving GenAI maturity.
The “Accelerating” stage represents “Target State” for many capabilities. “Breaking Away”, on the other hand, suggests that the specific Capability represents a clear competitive advantage for your business.
  • Streamline & Embed: Integrate GenAI into core workflows while eliminating friction points to make usage seamless and routine:
  • Embed Gap Assessments Into Talent and Performance Systems: Make skill diagnostics part of quarterly reviews or goal setting.
  • Link Skill Gaps to Workforce Planning: Inform hiring, promotion, and succession planning decisions with real capability data.
  • Ensure Gaps Drive Personalized Development Plans: Automate assignment of content, mentors, or coaching tied to assessed needs.
  • Leverage Automation: Use GenAI-powered tools and workflows to streamline repetitive tasks, enhance operational efficiency, and reduce manual effort:
  • Automate Assessment and Recommendation Workflows: Use AI to trigger nudges, surveys, or training based on data signals.
  • Enable Role-Specific Skill Dashboards: Visualize readiness and gaps by person, team, or business unit.
  • Deploy Smart Nudges to Managers: Suggest timely actions based on team capability trends or lagging metrics.
  • Evolve & Further Accelerate: Continuously refine GenAI strategies based on insights and outcomes, while expanding into more complex or high-impact use cases:
  • Update Skill Definitions With Business and Tech Changes: Keep models fresh with input from SMEs and AI governance leads.
  • Benchmark Skill Gap Data Across Industries: Validate maturity and highlight competitive differentiators.
  • Use Skill Gaps to Drive Strategic Capability Building: Inform cross-functional investments in learning, hiring, or restructuring.

Key "Watchouts"

As you take action you’ll want to avoid:

  • Starting Without a Clear Skill Model: Gap assessments are meaningless without role-specific expectations.
  • Using Assessments Only Once: Skill needs evolve-point-in-time data gets stale quickly.
  • Focusing Solely on Awareness, Not Application: True readiness requires practice-not just knowledge.
  • Treating Gaps as a Performance Issue: Position assessments as growth tools, not evaluations.
  • Failing to Connect Gaps to Action: Insight without follow-up leaves teams stuck and frustrated.

Targeted Benefits

While Assessing and Closing GenAI Skill Gaps can be challenging, its benefits are clear and compelling, including:

  • More Targeted Enablement: Upskilling resources go to the right people, at the right time.
  • Faster GenAI Readiness Across the Org: Teams build practical capabilities, not just awareness.
  • Smarter Talent Decisions: Data-informed plans for hiring, development, and succession.
  • Stronger Cross-Functional Collaboration: Shared understanding of who can do what, and where to invest.
  • Sustained Competitive Advantage: Skills evolve in sync with market and business needs.

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Eddie
Accelerated Innovation

Hi, I'm Eddie 👋

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