Skills Audit Solution / Peopletree Group

Get a verified, data-driven view of what your people actually know and can do. Behavioural and technical skills assessed in 4-6 weeks.

Skills Audit | Map Capability Gaps Across Your Workforce

Map current capability against future requirements. Identify gaps, prioritise L&D investment, and build a skills-based talent strategy.

KNOW YOUR GAPS

Skills Audit

Skills audit: map capability gaps

across your workforce.

Most organisations make workforce decisions based on job titles, CVs, and manager opinion. Our Skills Audit-as-a-Service gives you a verified, data-driven view of what your people actually know and can do, across behavioural and technical dimensions.

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years of skills assessment and competency management experience

countries where Peopletree skills frameworks have been applied

participation rate in a banking sector skills audit

typical deployment timeline from sign-off to go-live

The Problem

Skills data is broken in most organisations.

Two approaches dominate, and both fall short. Manager identification misses people who don't fit the mould. Self-nomination creates bias and political noise. Neither gives you a verified, organisation-wide picture of what skills actually exist.

Talent decisions driven by bias, not data

When there is no structured assessment framework, talent nominations become a popularity contest. Managers nominate the people they know best, the people who remind them of themselves, and the people who performed well recently. Research is consistent on this: unstructured nominations are heavily influenced by proximity bias, similarity bias, and recency bias. The result is that the organisation invests in the wrong people while its actual high-impact talent goes unrecognised.

High-Impact Positions filled by average performers

Not all roles create equal value. High-Impact Positions are the roles where the difference between an average performer and a high performer is not incremental - it is exponential. When those positions are filled by people who are capable but not exceptional, the organisation is leaving growth on the table. The problem is not always a recruitment issue. It is an alignment issue, and it requires a different kind of data to solve.

The 9-box grid is writing off your best people

The 9-box performance versus potential grid is the most widely used talent identification tool in the world, and one of the most unreliable. It conflates performance ratings that are already inflated with potential assessments that are rarely grounded in behavioural data. The result is a talent map that reflects manager perception rather than actual capability. Organisations that rely on it are systematically misidentifying their best people.

Five steps from framework to workforce intelligence.

A fully managed engagement. We handle taxonomy design, platform configuration, change management, data collection, analysis, and reporting. Your team participates; we deliver the output.

A verified skills picture for every employee across behavioural and technical dimensions.

Role-specific Success Profiles benchmarked against your actual workforce data.

A prioritised gap analysis with clear recommendations for development, deployment, and succession.

Define what good looks like

For every role that matters, define the behaviours, technical skills, and experience levels that success actually requires. This becomes the benchmark everything else is measured against.

We identify your High-Impact Positions first - the roles where the difference between average and exceptional performance creates disproportionate business value. Not every role needs the same depth of assessment; we focus effort where it matters most.

For each role in scope, we build a Success Profile that defines the technical knowledge foundation, the behavioural competencies required at that level, and the experience markers that predict performance. The Talent Genome provides the behavioural framework; your subject matter experts validate the technical dimensions.

The output of this phase is a set of benchmarks that every subsequent assessment is measured against. Without this step, assessment data is interesting but not actionable. With it, every result has a clear reference point.

Assess your people

Every employee completes a behavioural assessment and a technical skills profile. The data is collected digitally, at scale, with full change management and communication support.

Behavioural assessment uses TalentPrint's forced-ranking 360 methodology. Raters are required to differentiate - they cannot give everyone a high score. This eliminates the rating inflation and halo effect that make standard 1-5 scales unreliable for talent identification purposes.

Technical knowledge is assessed separately, using a structured taxonomy built from Peopletree master lists and validated by your internal subject matter experts. Depth is measured across three levels: awareness, practitioner, and expert. Experience exposure is captured alongside knowledge depth.

We manage the full assessment process: participant communications, rater selection, completion tracking, and escalation for non-completions. Participation rates above 95% are standard when the change management is handled properly.

Match people to roles

Individual results are compared against the role benchmarks. For every person, you can see where they meet the standard, where the gaps are, and how significant those gaps are.

Each individual's behavioural profile is compared against the Success Profile for their current role and, optionally, for target roles they are being considered for. The gap analysis shows not just whether a gap exists but how significant it is and whether it is developable.

The three-input model - technical knowledge, behavioural competencies, and performance data - is combined to produce a talent identification score for each individual. This is the data that replaces the 9-box grid with something defensible.

High-Impact Talent are identified based on the combined data, not manager perception. The output is a ranked view of your workforce that HR and leadership can use to make investment decisions with confidence.

See the full picture

Strengths and gaps across the workforce are visualised in live dashboards. Reports at individual, team, and organisation level give leadership what they need to make decisions.

DataWiz dashboards give HR and the executive team a live view of capability coverage by role family, level, and business unit. The heat map shows where the organisation is strong, where it is fragile, and where it is most exposed to attrition or succession risk.

Individual reports are generated for each assessed employee, showing their profile against the role benchmark, their development priorities, and their readiness for the next level. These reports are designed to be shared directly with the employee and their manager.

The talent identification output - the ranked view of High-Impact Talent - is presented to the executive team with clear recommendations for investment, development, and role alignment. This is the conversation that changes how the organisation thinks about its people.

Act on it and sustain it

Findings are presented to your executive and HR teams with clear recommendations. Your team is set up to maintain the system and run future cycles without external help.

We facilitate the talent review session with HR and the executive team, walking through the findings, challenging assumptions, and helping the organisation make decisions about development investment, role alignment, and succession planning.

Development plans are built for identified High-Impact Talent, connecting the gaps identified in the assessment to specific development actions in TalentPrint. The assessment does not end with a report - it ends with a plan.

The Success Profiles, taxonomy, and platform configuration remain in your system after the engagement. Future assessment cycles can be run internally or with Peopletree support, at a fraction of the cost of the initial engagement.

HOW IT IS DELIVERED

The platform components and frameworks that drive the skills audit. Each one plays a specific role in producing your verified skills picture.

Assessment engine

Runs the behavioural assessments using forced-ranking 360 methodology. Produces verified competency profiles for every employee assessed.

TalentProfile

Skills profiling

Captures each employee's technical skills, experience, qualifications, and career preferences in a structured, searchable profile.

Aggregates all skills audit data into a single view. Houses Success Profiles, stores gap analysis, and powers the workforce dashboards.

Talent Genome

Behavioural framework

The behavioural framework behind the assessment. 18 clusters and 60 competencies built from 98 peer-reviewed studies.

Skills Taxonomy

Technical skills map

A structured map of 16 skill domains and 3 proficiency levels. Tailored to your organisation during the discovery phase.

Business Value

What a verified skills picture enables.

Workforce capability visibility

A complete, verified picture of what skills exist across the organisation - behavioural and technical - at individual, team, and enterprise level.

Data-driven talent decisions

Placement, promotion, and development decisions grounded in verified capability data, not manager opinion or CV claims.

Targeted L&D investment

Training needs analysis generated directly from gap data. Investment goes to verified gaps, not assumed ones.

Internal mobility and succession

Identify employees ready to move into new roles or functions. Feed directly into succession planning and career pathing.

Scalable and repeatable

The taxonomy, Success Profiles, and platform configuration remain in place for future cycles. Each subsequent audit is faster and cheaper.

Strategic alignment

Map workforce capability against strategic priorities. Identify where the organisation has the talent to execute, and where it does not.

Case Study

Aligning a workforce to a new strategy.

Retail Banking · 500-1,000 employees · 8 months · 100% participation

A national retail bank executing a business turnaround strategy needed to answer a fundamental question: does the existing workforce have the skills to design and execute the new strategy? The HR team required a real-time, data-driven approach to evaluate staff competency levels across all departments.

Peopletree collaborated with the bank's executive team and HR to define Success Profiles across all critical roles. TalentPrint was deployed for behavioural assessment; TalentProfile captured technical skills and experience. DataHub aggregated all data into a single workforce intelligence view.

Peopletree developed customised Success Profiles defining the key attributes required for success in each role and function. Using TalentPrint, every employee was assessed for role fit and development needs. The DataHub Success Profile Module provided real-time visibility of workforce capability against strategic requirements.

Participation rate

Engagement duration

Platforms integrated

Who needs a Skills Audit?

Organisations executing a new strategy, restructuring, or needing to understand workforce capability before making people decisions at scale.

See which questions this practice answers

Ready to see what your workforce actually has?

Talk to our team about how a Skills Audit can shape your talent strategy and workforce planning decisions.

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COMMON QUESTIONS

Common questions about talent identification

What is the difference between a skills audit and a talent identification engagement?

A skills audit maps the current capability profile of your workforce against the skills required for your strategy. It answers the question: what do we have, and where are the gaps? Talent identification goes deeper - it uses the skills audit data combined with behavioural assessment and performance data to identify the specific individuals who are your High-Impact Talent. Most organisations run a skills audit first to establish the baseline, then use talent identification to determine who deserves disproportionate investment.

How long does the engagement take?

A skills audit for a workforce of 200 to 500 people takes four to six weeks from kickoff to final report. A full talent identification engagement, including Success Profile development, assessment, gap analysis, and the talent review session, typically runs eight to ten weeks. Larger or more complex organisations may take twelve weeks. The timeline depends primarily on the number of roles in scope and the quality of existing job architecture.

Do we need a competency framework before we start?

No. If you do not have a competency framework, we use the Talent Genome - a research-based framework of 60 competencies mapped to roles and levels, grounded in 98 peer-reviewed studies. If you have an existing framework, we align the assessment to it. Either way, the engagement produces a consistent, comparable view of capability across your workforce that is built on a defensible methodological foundation.

What does the output look like?

The primary outputs are a capability heat map showing skill coverage and gaps by role family, level, and business unit; a ranked view of High-Impact Talent with supporting data; individual development reports for each assessed employee; and a DataWiz dashboard that lets HR and leadership filter the data by any dimension. The talent review session translates the data into decisions about investment, development, and role alignment.

How is this different from a standard 360 assessment?

A standard 360 assessment collects feedback from multiple raters but typically uses a 1-5 rating scale, which produces score clustering and makes it impossible to differentiate between people. TalentPrint uses forced-ranking methodology, which requires raters to differentiate. The result is a distribution of scores that actually reflects the range of capability in the organisation. Combined with technical knowledge data and performance history, it produces a talent picture that is significantly more reliable than a standard 360.

Can we run this for a specific team or level rather than the whole organisation?

Yes, and this is often the right starting point. A scoped engagement covering a single function, leadership level, or role family is faster, lower cost, and easier to manage. The methodology is identical; the scope is narrower. Results can be rolled up into a broader organisational view in subsequent cycles. Many clients start with their senior leadership population and expand from there.

What happens after the assessment is complete?

The assessment does not end with a report. We facilitate the talent review session with HR and the executive team, walking through the findings and helping the organisation make decisions about development investment, role alignment, and succession planning. Development plans are built for identified High-Impact Talent in TalentPrint. The Success Profiles and platform configuration remain in your system for future cycles.