54% of managers say employees often get work they lack skills to do

More than half of managers surveyed said employees are frequently or always assigned work requiring skills they lack, according to Skillsoft’s Oct. 15 release of its Workforce Readiness Report: Execution Gap Edition. Among individual contributors, 37% reported the same mismatch, compared with 54% of managers.

The skills-management platform company’s research covered 2,000 full-time individual contributors, managers and executives in the United States, United Kingdom and Germany. An independent market research firm conducted the survey in August 2026.

Managers expressed confidence in their organizations’ ability to identify needed skills even as they reported mismatched assignments. Some 62% were very confident their organization could identify the skills required to deliver on business priorities, compared with 35% of individual contributors. Separately, 77% of managers and 60% of individual contributors said skills gaps existed in their workplace.

Employees often discovered the problem while doing the work: 25% of individual contributors said a missing skill surfaced after they struggled to complete a task, while another 25% identified it during a performance review. Help could take months. Thirty percent said they waited three to 12 months for support building a needed skill; one in 10 received none.

The reported consequences differed by role. Quality assurance issues were managers’ most frequently cited effect of skills gaps, at 31%. Individual contributors most often cited increased workload and burnout, also at 31%, followed by lower engagement or retention at 24%.

AI added another demand on managers’ time. Twenty-three percent cited delayed or unsuccessful AI adoption as a consequence of skills gaps, while 38% said they were spending more time reviewing or verifying AI-generated work.