You Don't Have a Skills Gap. You Have a Skills-Naming Problem.

"We need better communication." "Our people lack ownership." "They can't influence stakeholders." Every L&D leader has heard these, written them into a brief, and turned them into a programme. And every one of them is a fog, not a target. "Communication" is not a skill. It is a suitcase word with a dozen distinct capabilities packed inside it: listening under pressure, structuring a message for an executive, giving hard feedback, running a room, writing so a busy person acts. Train "communication" and you have trained nothing in particular, which is why nothing in particular changes.

The uncomfortable truth is that most organisations do not have a skills gap in the sense they think. They have a naming gap. They cannot describe, in specific and observable terms, the exact capability they want more of. And you cannot close a gap you cannot name, because you cannot design for it, cannot measure it, and cannot tell whether you moved it.

A skills gap you can name is a training plan. A skills gap you can't name is a budget waiting to be wasted on a word.

Why this is getting more expensive, fast

Vague skill language has always wasted money, but the cost is rising because the skills themselves are moving under everyone's feet.

The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025 estimates that 39% of workers' core skills will change or become outdated by 2030, and frames large-scale reskilling as one of the decade's defining workforce challenges. You cannot reskill against a moving target with a fixed fog. When nearly four in ten skills are shifting, the ability to name precisely what capability you need, and re-name it as it changes, stops being an L&D nicety and becomes the whole game.

So the first move in any capability effort is not sourcing a course. It is disambiguation: turning the suitcase word into the specific, observable behaviour underneath it.

From suitcase word to trainable skill

The test is simple and brutal. Take the skill you say you need and ask: could two managers watch the same person and agree on whether they have it? "Communication" fails instantly. "Can summarise a complex update into three sentences an executive can act on" passes. The second is observable, so it is teachable, measurable, and provable. The first is a vibe.

This is also where generic competency frameworks quietly let teams down. A framework that lists "Communication" as a competency with a five-point scale has simply given the fog a rating. The work that matters is one level deeper: naming the two or three specific behaviours, inside that competency, that this team, in this role, actually needs to move this quarter.

What changes when you name it right

Once the skill is named as an observable behaviour, everything downstream gets easier. The programme designs itself around the behaviour rather than the topic. The measurement is obvious, because you can see the behaviour or you can't. And the conversation with any training vendor sharpens: you are no longer buying "a communication workshop," you are buying a measurable shift in a specific, named behaviour, with a before and an after.

That is the entire difference between an L&D function that reacts to fog and one that diagnoses precisely. The gap was never the problem. The word you used for it was.

Sources

• World Economic Forum, Future of Jobs Report 2025: 39% of core skills expected to change by 2030 (weforum.org).

Written by Mahesh Tharani. Connect on LinkedIn.