5 Challenges That Skills Intelligence Can Solve

L&D leaders are in dire need of nimble workforces. As skill lifespans shrink, having a robust professional development strategy is a strong catalyst for success. But excellence is a difficult target to hit when you don’t know where to start.

While over 90% of learning leaders believe that continuous skills development is necessary for meaningful business growth, many still struggle to understand the real skills their workforces have, which naturally hinders planning. If you can’t see your skills, you can’t grow them.

If you’re facing this issue, it’s time to consider deploying skills intelligence to solve for this lack of visibility in your organization.

What Is Skills Intelligence and Why Does It Matter? 

Skills intelligence is at the core of a skills-based learning model. It is an AI-driven approach that uses skill taxonomies and real-time skills data to: 

• map out the capabilities that exist in a workplace 
• identify skill gaps 
• streamline planning for L&D professionals 

The process of discovering individual skills—and skills in aggregate—allows companies to determine the best way to grow and use them.

According to Deloitte, skill-first organizations are 107% more likely to place talent effectively, and 57% more inclined to anticipate change and respond efficiently. Companies that use skills intelligence are more agile, and given its data-rich nature, learning leaders can confidently make talent decisions that help solve a variety of L&D challenges. Here are a few examples.

Five Challenges Solved Through Skills Intelligence

Persistent Skill Gaps: Coursework alone isn’t enough to close gaps in your organization. If you’ve invested in training and can’t see progress, it’s likely due to not understanding your workforce’s current skills inventory, which makes it difficult to identify where the actual gaps are. 
 
For your learning plan to be successful, it requires your expertise to pinpoint patterns, data to back up your decisions, and AI to help you scale and automate your strategy. Skills intelligence helps you with all three, enabling learning leaders to systematically collect, analyze and interpret skills data and gain insights into development needs and learning suggestions. That allows you to create personalized learning journeys for each employee to bridge the real gaps in your company.   

Ineffective Training: According to a 2025 survey by Randstad, 31% of employees report that they quit a job because of a lack of career progression and opportunities. Organizations need to effectively build, champion, and communicate meaningful development programs to retain top talent. To do so, L&D professionals use skills intelligence to sit down with employees and build learning pathways that are unique to their individual capabilities and career goals. This method takes out the guesswork from upskilling efforts, leading your workforce to grow in the right direction.  

Misaligned Learning Investments: Training programs that are based on stale data, and that are generically assigned to all employees with the same job title, won’t yield results. Skills intelligence provides learning leaders with visibility through personalized learning paths, ensuring that investments directly relate to key requirements in each employee’s upskilling journey. You can streamline this process with AI, using a tool like SkillWave’s Guide feature, which makes smart learning recommendations based on employees’ competencies and career goals, leading to meaningful development and properly allocated learning dollars.

Poor Talent Mobility: With 74% of employers struggling to find new skilled talent, poor internal mobility in your organization isn’t an option. Skills intelligence helps companies retain and advance high performing individuals through skill mapping. This method helps learning leaders identify their workforce’s existing capabilities and its outstanding skill requirements to effectively plan and grow talent.  

Lack of Workforce Readiness: It’s common to struggle with forecasting skill gaps and future roles. The real-time, granular data that skills intelligence provides allows for learning leaders to make smarter workforce decisions, redeploy talent where it’s needed, and predict upcoming capability needs based on detailed analytics and trends. This agility boosts organizations’ competitive edge, outpacing other companies in times of change.  

How to Use Skills Intelligence at Your Company 

Skills are the new currency. Traditional training programs can’t keep up with market and technological disruptions, but an adaptable learning program anchored in skills intelligence can.  

Making the shift to a skills-based learning model is the key to creating an agile workforce and effectively filling gaps. To do so, use AI and machine learning to analyze real-time, market labor data, align skills to roles, and craft personalized learning pathways for each employee. If you’re considering this approach, our free Skills Intelligence Playbook walks you through best practices on how to implement, scale and automate it in your organization.