Complete a Skills Gap Analysis for Your Charity

Before you sit down to write a job ad, you need to figure out the skills gaps at your charity. Do you need to hire someone new? Maybe you have existing unused talent in your charity? An effective way to find out the answers to these questions is to conduct a skills gap analysis.  

A skills gap analysis is useful to understand the types of skills that might be lacking in your organisation. Here’s a step-by-step process to create your own skills gap analysis.

1) Hone your charity’s values and objectives

Does your charity have clearly outlined values and objectives? And here, we don’t just mean a broad five-year plan. Having a detailed, measurable set of objectives is essential to identify the skills you need today. This will inform  whether it is more important to focus on fundraising, donor retention, website user experience, or something else. Don’t overlook this first step because your entire recruitment plan should depend on it.

2) Research the future of work trends

We all know that Covid-19 has changed the way we work. Rapid technological change has led to evolution in many traditional charity roles. The sector found new ways to communicate with donors, raise funds and engage with volunteers.  

Are you staying ahead of the curve? It’s certainly worth taking the time to evaluate whether your organisation needs more digital expertise.  

3) Identify the skills needed to achieve your objectives 

Conduct an inventory of the skills that your charity currently has. You can do this in several different ways. 

At an individual level –  You may wish to conduct a skills assessment in the form of a survey or interviews with each employee. Ask each of them to rate themselves on their proficiency in completing particular tasks or using given tools, and then ask their line manager to answer the same questions on their behalf.  

HR technology can help you to gather and to analyse feedback  about your employees. 

At a team level – Conduct an assessment of team  KPIs, and interviews with line managers to discuss the skills they feel are lacking in their teams. Is there anything that is stopping them from achieving their team objectives? 

4) Analyse and act on the data 

There are two ways to fill any of the skills gaps that you’ve identified: to train up existing employees, or to hire new staff.  

Training: There are many ways to offer effective training to upskill your staff. If done effectively, training can be a powerful retention tool. Your skills analysis will show whether you have anyone internally who could conduct training sessions.  

If not, you’ll find that there are many external providers who can help. You might want to explore the organisations below which offer a broad range of training courses for our sector.  

Courses on The CharityJob website – Courses on running a charity, fundraising, marketing, project management and more.  

NCVO – Writing successful bids, charity finance and writing your strategy. 

The Directory of Social Change – Training on fundraising, personal development, governance, finance, marketing and more.  

Management Centre – Training on people management, strategic leadership, building a resilient team, performance management and more.  

Hiring: If your skills gap is still too wide, hiring is the way to go.  Your next step will be to focus on writing a stellar job ad that will attract candidates with all the skills that you’re looking for!

Get your skills gap right and you’re onto a winner 

Many organisations don’t spend enough time on this very first part of the recruitment process, which means that they might end up hiring a less than ideal person for the role and find that further down the line that the same skills gap continues to persist. So, it’s worth really taking a deep dive into this analysis and making sure that all angles are covered.