Skills Audit: How to Do One (With a Template and Example)

What a skills audit is, how to do one step by step, a template you can copy, and how to turn the results into CV lines and a development plan, with a worked example for a career changer.

By Tony Musso on Sun Oct 18 2026

A skills audit is a structured look at what you can do, how well you can do it, and what you need to learn next. It sounds like something only HR departments run, but it is one of the most useful things you can do for yourself before a career change, an appraisal or a CV rewrite.

This guide explains what a skills audit is, walks you through doing one step by step, gives you a template you can copy, and shows how to turn the results into CV lines and a development plan.

What is a skills audit?

A skills audit is a list of your skills, each rated honestly and backed up with evidence, set against the skills you need for the job you have or the one you want. The difference between the two is your skills gap, and the audit ends with actions to close it.

Individuals use skills audits to:

• Plan a career change, by seeing which existing skills carry over and which gaps need filling.
• Prepare for an appraisal, with evidence of what you have developed over the year.
• Rewrite a CV, so it reflects your strongest, best-evidenced skills rather than a list of duties.
• Decide on training, so time and money go on the gaps that actually matter.

For teams and employers, a skills audit does the same job at a larger scale: it maps the skills people have across a team against what the organisation will need, so managers can plan training, recruitment and succession. The steps below work for both, but this guide focuses on doing one for yourself.

How to do a skills audit, step by step

1. Choose your target

An audit needs something to measure against. That might be your current job description, a role you want to be promoted into, or two or three job adverts for a career you are considering. Save them, because you will use them in step 4.

2. List your skills

Write down everything you can do, without judging yet. Work through these headings so you do not miss anything:

• Technical or job-specific skills: software, tools, processes, regulations, specialist knowledge.
• Transferable skills: communication, organisation, problem solving, managing people, handling money, customer service.
• Personal qualities: reliability, staying calm under pressure, attention to detail.
• Skills from outside work: volunteering, caring, running a club, side projects, study.

Go back through old job descriptions, appraisals and your CV for prompts. Most people undersell themselves at this stage, so be generous with the list.

3. Rate each skill from 1 to 5

Use a simple scale:

1. Aware of it, but no real experience
2. Basic: can do it with help
3. Competent: can do it independently
4. Strong: can handle difficult cases and help others
5. Expert: others come to you for it

Be honest. An audit full of 5s does not tell you anything.

4. Add evidence

For every skill rated 3 or above, write one specific example of when you used it, and the result. This is the step most people skip, and it is the most valuable one. Evidence turns "good communicator" into something an employer can believe, and it becomes the raw material for your CV and interview answers.

5. Find the gaps

Compare your list with the target roles from step 1. Note:

• Skills the role needs that you do not have.
• Skills you have but at a lower level than the role needs.
• Skills you have that the role needs, but you lack evidence for.

6. Decide on actions

For each gap, write one realistic action: a course, a project at work, shadowing a colleague, volunteering, or simply getting a piece of evidence you already could have. Give each action a date.

Skills audit template

Copy this table into a document or spreadsheet and add a row for each skill:

Keep the evidence column short and specific. If you cannot think of evidence, that is useful information too.

Spotting your transferable skills

Transferable skills are the ones that move with you between jobs and sectors. They are the backbone of most career changes, because they are what lets an employer take a chance on someone without direct experience.

Common examples include:

• Communication: explaining things clearly, writing reports, handling difficult conversations.
• Organisation: managing your own workload, rotas, deadlines and records.
• Problem solving: working out why something has gone wrong and fixing it.
• Working with people: supervising, training, supporting colleagues or customers.
• Numeracy and handling money: budgets, cashing up, stock, targets.
• Digital skills: using systems confidently and learning new ones quickly.

A retail supervisor, a teaching assistant and a hospitality manager all use most of these every day, even if their job titles sound unrelated to the role they want next.

Turning your audit into CV lines

Your evidence column is already half a CV. To convert it:

1. Start with a strong verb: led, organised, trained, reduced, introduced, resolved.
2. Say what you did, specifically.
3. Finish with the result.

For example, the project management row above becomes: "Organised an office move for 20 staff, coordinating suppliers and IT so the team was working normally the next morning."

If you are changing careers, put your most relevant transferable skills near the top of your CV. Our guide to the career change CV shows how to structure it so an employer sees what carries over before they see an unrelated job title. When you are ready, the CV builder will help you lay it out.

Turning your audit into a development plan

The gap and action columns are the start of a development plan. Pick the two or three gaps that matter most for your target role and work on those first, rather than trying to fix everything at once.

Our guide to writing a personal development plan shows how to turn each action into a goal with a timescale and a way to measure progress. If you have an appraisal coming up, take both documents with you: they show your manager you have thought about your development and give you something concrete to ask for, such as training or a stretch project.

Repeat the audit every six to twelve months, or whenever you are considering a move. Your ratings should change, and seeing that progress is motivating in itself.

Example: a skills audit for a career changer

Sam has worked in hospitality for eight years and is now a restaurant assistant manager. Sam wants to move into an office-based operations or project coordinator role.

Strengths Sam found:

• Managing people (4): schedules and supervises a team of twelve, and has trained most of them.
• Handling pressure (4): runs service on the busiest nights of the week.
• Budgets and stock (3): orders stock weekly and keeps within an agreed budget.
• Problem solving (4): deals with supplier failures, staff absence and complaints on the spot.

Gaps Sam found:

• Spreadsheets (2): target roles ask for confident Excel use.
• Project tools (1): job adverts mention project management software Sam has never used.
• Formal reporting (2): little experience writing reports for senior managers.

Sam's actions:

• Take a free online spreadsheet course and use it to rebuild the restaurant's stock tracker.
• Offer to coordinate the next menu launch as a project, with a written plan and a short report afterwards.
• Rewrite the CV to lead with operations and team leadership, using examples from the audit.

The audit showed Sam that most of the skills for the new role were already there, and that the gaps were specific and fixable. That changes a vague wish to "get out of hospitality" into a plan. For more ideas on where skills like Sam's can lead, see our list of the best career change jobs in the UK, and our career change hub for the practical side of making the move.

Put names to what you're good at Career Strengths identifies your natural strengths and gives you clear words to describe them, which makes the first step of a skills audit much easier.

Take Career Strengths

If you are weighing up options, our guide to choosing a career test explains what a good one tells you and what it cannot.