Mapping training needs with a skills gap analysis

A skills gap analysis shows the difference between what employees can do today and what their role requires. In large organisations, this is often done with surveys or interviews that take weeks. Xylos Insights does it with short AI conversations in your people's own language. You get the results within days.

A survey measures what your people think they can do. Everyone fills in the scale differently. What you miss is the context: which tasks take a lot of time, which tools your people already use, how they like to learn?

Physical interviews do provide that context, but with 200 participants you can easily spend two months on it.

An AI agent talks with each employee during three short conversations. This can be in Dutch, French, English or German.

1. Work and pain points (about 25 minutes): daily tasks, tools and frustrations. The agent compares them with more than 10,000 use cases from the market.

2. Attitude towards AI (about 5 minutes): six dimensions, such as proactivity and learning drive. You see who leads the way and who needs more guidance.

3. Knowledge and learning preferences (about 10 minutes): where someone is strong, where the most progress can be made and which learning format works best.

You see per team which AI applications deliver the most, with time savings, feasibility and impact side by side. Per role, you know where your people stand today and where they need to go. Your managers compare in a heatmap how teams score on the same six dimensions.

Each participant receives a personal report with a learning path. The scan also shows where repetitive work sits and where automation or an AI agent saves time.

Take a business analyst who is now at an intermediate level and needs to become advanced. Their biggest need is learning to build simple agents, and they prefer to learn hands-on or with short videos. Their learning path consists of microlearning on their smartphone, a workshop in a small group where they practise straight away, a coached session within the AI policy and peer coaching on the work floor.

At Maxeda, 550 employees went through the first two conversations. At Multipharma, a four-week scan is running in which 20 directors and AI champions go through all three conversations. Together, that adds up to about 1,500 AI conversations in one month. In a project with 200 participants, the results are ready in week 5, whereas a physical approach needs until week 12.

With Xylos Insights, Xylos maps learning needs and turns them into a tailored learning path, down to the level of each employee. Without an L&D team in-house? Also read how to draw up a training plan without L&D. Find out more about our approach at Learning Services.