What should be analyzed first in training needs assessment?

How do you currently decide what type of internal training you want your team to attend? It can be a challenge to make sure you are picking the correct training for each team member, and ensuring your team get the most benefit from the training you have selected.

How To Conduct An Effective Training Needs Analysis: A Step-By-Step Guide For Instructional Designers

Discover hints and tips on how to conduct the best training needs analysis for your company.

One key way to ensure you have selected the right training for your organisation is to complete a training needs analysis. Let’s take a look below at what training needs analysis is, and how you can use one to benefit your organisation!

What Is Training Needs Analysis?

Training needs analysis is a process that a business goes through in order to determine all the training that needs to be completed in a certain period to allow their team to complete their job as effectively as possible, as well as progress and grow.

There are 3 key steps involved in training needs analysis to ensure your business is making the most of the process:

1. Decide On Skill Sets
   The first stage is to decide on the skill sets that you require all your team members to have in order to do their jobs properly. This means looking at every job role within your business separately and considering things like the different departments or levels of seniority which will affect this as well.
2. Evaluate The Skills Of Staff
   The second stage is to look at all your team members and evaluate their current skill levels in relation to the skills you have laid out in the first stage of this process. This will allow you to see who is meeting your expectations, and who needs to complete further training in order to meet the expected skill level.
3. Highlight The Skills Gap
   Now that you know where you want your team to be and the level they are currently at, you will easily be able to see the gap (if any) that has appeared between the two. Now you know what the gap is, you need to use training to help close that gap and ensure your team is at the level you expect them to be.

Benefits For Your Business

1. Identify Knowledge Gaps Before They Become A Problem

One huge benefit of conducting training needs analysis is the fact it can help you identify any knowledge gaps your employees may have before it becomes an issue. It’s better to highlight a potential problem and tackle it head-on, rather than becoming aware of the skills gap when an issue arises because of it.

The training needs analysis will allow you to take a proactive approach rather than waiting for something to go wrong before you realise there is a problem.

2. Helps You To Plan Your Training For The Year

Another huge benefit of training needs analysis is that it makes it much easier for you to plan your training for the upcoming year (or whatever block of time you work with). Once you have identified the skills gaps that exist in your business, and then all the staff members who need additional training in certain areas, it’s easy to pull together a training plan which will cover all these skills gaps.

Rather than trying to guess the type of training that will be most useful to your organisation, or who needs to complete the training, your training needs analysis will make the whole task much easier, and you can be confident that the training you have selected will make a direct impact on your business!

3. Highlights Training You May Not Have Considered

It can be hard to sit down and plan out a training schedule for a large organisation without completing some sort of background research first. You may think that you know the type of training your team should be completing, but training needs analysis could actually highlight a whole load of areas that your team needs training on that you never even considered before.

That’s why training needs analysis is so useful because it can highlight training needs you may not have considered before and show that you need to start offering training in different areas to ensure your staff are performing at their best.

Without the use of training needs analysis, you may never have considered a particular area of training, which could have severely hindered your business.

4. Ensures Your Training Is Focussing On The Right Areas

As we said above, it’s important to have concrete reasons for adding training to your training schedule, as you can’t just assume what is and isn’t important for your team to learn. Completing a training needs analysis will allow you to see exactly what you need to focus on, but it will also highlight the areas your team really don’t need any further training on for the moment.

If there are no apparent gaps in knowledge in a particular area, then running further training on it could be a waste of time and money!

5. Helps To Decide Who Should Attend Which Training Sessions

Another important step in planning training is to ensure the right people are in the right training sessions. There is no point in making everyone in your organisation attend every training session you run. It’s a massive waste of time and money for your business, and staff won’t be engaged with training sessions if they are frequently attending training which is of no use to them.

A training needs analysis will enable you to target the correct people for each training session, ensuring everyone is following a personalised training plan, so they get the most benefit possible.

6. Helps You To Prioritise Training Needs

When it comes to planning out your training, it can be hard to decide which training sessions are the most important. However, training needs analysis can help you pinpoint the training which needs to be completed ASAP, and which training can be left till later down the line.

When you think about the skills that each team member needs to have, you may want to prioritise these regarding how key they are. For example, if you have a customer-facing team, ensuring they have top-notch customer relations skills may be top of the list.

If you notice a gap in the face-to-face skills for some of these employees, it only makes sense that you would want to tackle this first, as this is a key aspect of their job role, and lack of training in this area could have a negative effect on your business.

All other training can be prioritised afterwards, but it’s important to get that customer relations training booked in and attended as soon as possible to make sure your customer-facing teams are top performers.

Anyway, the eBook 'How To Conduct An Effective Training Needs Analysis: A Step-By-Step Guide For Instructional Designers' is here to make clear everything about how Training Needs Analysis can benefit your organization at all levels!

Being able to conduct a training needs analysis is a key tool for any L&D professional. In this article, we will explain what a training needs analysis is, provide a template for conducting this analysis, and give a training needs analysis example. This guide will be useful for L&D professionals, trainers, and consultants alike.

Contents
What is a training needs analysis?
Training needs analysis best practices
Training needs analysis template
Training needs analysis for individuals
Training needs analysis questions
Conclusion
FAQ

What is a training needs analysis?

A training needs analysis (or TNA) always happens for a reason. Whether you are a learning and development (L&D) professional, trainer, or consultant, a TNA always serves a specific purpose.

The need for such analysis usually arises due to an organizational problem. This can be a lower than expected quarter for the sales team, changing technology threatening to impact the continuity of train operators, or constantly low customer satisfaction scores forcing the product team to work in a more agile and customer-focused way.

In all these instances, the problems can potentially be resolved through training. This is where the training needs analysis comes in. The training needs analysis is a process in which the gap between the actual and the desired knowledge, skills, and attitudes (KSAs) in a job are identified.

This is not to say that every problem can be solved through a training needs analysis – on the contrary! Most problems are caused by other organizational issues. Only when the problem is caused by a lack of knowledge, skills or attitudes, can a training and the required training needs analysis, be a viable solution.

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This may mean that instead of a lack of knowledge, skills, or attitudes, our diagnosis may point out that sales are low because of a mismatch between the work and the rewards. Or that customer satisfaction is low because the top-down driven product strategy is not in line with what customers are looking for. These problems cannot be solved through training (alone) but require an organizational intervention.

Another example that I’ve run into, is an assertiveness training that a large county hospital was looking to purchase from a respected vendor. The problem was an increase in harassment incidents and an increase in medical errors, caused by the fact that nurses did not speak up. The organization was looking to train these nurses on assertiveness.

During the intake, the trainer realized that the organizational culture was highly hierarchical and that it was not unusual for people who did speak up to be fired or otherwise punished. The trainer refused to participate, explaining that the hospital first had to work on a culture where it was safe to speak up before training its staff to actually do so. Doing it the other way around could have devastating consequences for the nurses.

Training needs analysis best practices

Before providing you with a training needs analysis template, we will first go over three best practices that have impacted our recommendation for our training needs analysis template.

1. Training effectiveness is difficult to assess. This has a number of reasons, the most important one being its disconnect with organizational goals. A best practice is therefore to start with the desired outcome and then work back to which activities lead to these organizational outcomes, before identifying training activities. This outcome can be an organizational or departmental goal or an individual target that needs to be improved.
2. Managing expectations. Training and training needs analysis requires advanced stakeholder management. Stakeholders include employees, service users (the ultimate beneficiaries of care, often customers), educational providers who design and deliver the program, and internal sponsors who pay for the educational event. Ensuring that the training satisfies all groups is crucial for its success. In other words, when a manager thinks that a communication training session will solve all their internal problems, you need to manage their expectations.
3. Integrated approach. Research shows that training programs that place new skills in a broader job or organizational perspective and thus integrate it with other organizational processes and activities are more successful. This does not mean that you cannot focus your training on something specific, but you will need to place what people learn into an organizational perspective.

Up next, we will provide a training needs analysis template that integrates these.

Training needs analysis template – an example

In this example, we will assume that there is an organizational need that can be fulfilled through a training solution.

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When conducting a training needs analysis, it is good practice to follow a standardized template. The template we use is shown below. In this section, we will go through each of its steps using an example, explain the different elements to account for, and define what is needed to move forward to the next step.

We will first go through this template based on an organizational issue before explaining this template for individual training issues as both approaches are vastly different. 

As described earlier, a training needs analysis is always initiated by an organizational symptom or pain point. Filip Moriau calls this ‘organizational stress’ in the context of future skills in the first five minutes of the video below.

The situation is usually that a (senior) management comes to the L&D team with one of these symptoms and asks them how they can help to fix it. These problems can range from an organization losing its innovative lead, a sales department struggling to increase market share for a fast-growing scale-up, or because the board has come up with an organizational capability that everyone in the organization must develop. 

All these challenges are related to organizational goals. If this is not the case, the challenges are usually not worth fixing and the manager is unlikely to approach L&D for a training solution. If the organizational goal is initially unclear to you, take your time to explore it as this will help you diagnose the problem and training needs.

When we talk about organizational goals or outcomes, we focus on measurements such as financial performance, revenue, profit, Return on Equity, Return on Capital Employed, earning growth, and share price, but also softer outcomes like customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, and organizational culture. Organizational goals and outcomes are hard to influence as the entire organization contributes to them and they are to a large extent subject to influences outside of employee behavior. This means that it is hard to improve them through training.

The best approach is to either break the organizational goal down to a department or individual goal (we will do this later in this article) or to focus on core competencies.

Core competencies are competencies that are required for everyone in the organization. Most organizations have defined these and have specified what good performance on these competencies looks like. Everyone in the organization should have a basic proficiency level on these competencies. As there is consensus on these core capabilities already, it is relatively easy to define the relevant job behaviors for them (step 2).

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However, before going to the next step, it is the role of the L&D professional to examine if this organizational goal can be reached through relevant job behaviors alone (step 2), or whether this is also impacted through non-behavioral influences. If there are non-behavioral influences that impact these goals, they should be addressed in tandem with the learning solution.

Step 2. Define relevant job behaviors

Let’s say we are an L&D professional working for a large consulting company. At the moment, a small group of partners sells large-scale projects to clients. However, in the future, all consultants will be required to sell their services to (potential) clients. In other words, this will be a new core competency that everyone in the organization needs to develop to some degree.

The next step is to define the relevant job behaviors that will build this competency. These are the behavioral elements in the job that will be helpful in achieving the set organizational goal. 

For consultants to sell their services, they need to build relationships, be able to spot and explore opportunities, provide solutions, and finally seal the deal commercially. If we were to define these behaviors, they would look something like the following.

The next step is about breaking down these high-over behaviors into the required skills and knowledge required to effectively show this behavior.

Step 3. Define the required knowledge & skills

The relationship building and commercial behaviors we have defined earlier need to be specified before we can move on to a training program. The more specific we can make these behaviors, the easier it will be to create training programs that fulfill these behavioral dimensions.

As you can see, we have combined three behaviors into two behavioral groups and defined the required skills and knowledge for each of them. In this case, we used a competency framework by the Canadian Professional Sales Association for the basic skills and knowledge elements and adapted them to consultative sales.

To finalize this framework, it is advised to get input from people in the organization who already have these skills and to go back to the assignment-giver. The former can help to check if these behaviors, skills, and knowledge will help to achieve the goal the organization is striving for and the latter can indicate to what degree the knowledge and skills accurately reflect the core competencies the organization is looking for.

The last step is to assess the current skills in the organization. Not everyone will need the same training. For example, the partners in the consulting firm will have extensive sales experience already – they will not benefit from the training. A senior staff member will require different training than an associate or a junior. All these nuances need to be determined before you can move on to the next stage.

To map the available skills, different techniques can be used. There are the more traditional organizational surveys and interviews, or the more advanced analytical techniques such as data mining on human resource information system data, text mining CVs or personal development plans to identify groups of employees with similar KSAs, and text mining of job descriptions or vacancy texts to identify required competency levels per function.

Step 4. Training

The next step in the process is the training design. Here you communicate the required learning outcomes you defined in step 3 to the training provider(s), determine a budget, scope the time investment of the training, and decide if you will work with internal or external trainers.

Do not forget to consider non-training alternatives that can also help to develop the required knowledge and skills. This can be the inclusion of these core competencies in the performance management review, adding them as selection criteria in the hiring process, and praising and rewarding the defined behavior. All these interventions will help to build and reinforce this knowledge and skills.

This is where the ADDIE model comes in. The ADDIE model is arguably the best-known model about training design. ADDIE is an acronym for Analyze, Design, Develop, Implement, and Evaluate. Good training design goes through all five stages.

The first stage, analyze, is where the training needs analysis comes in. In this stage, instructional goals are defined and aligned with organizational goals; the target audience is determined; behavioral outcomes are identified; and learning constraints are identified. All these elements are addressed in the training needs analysis model you learned about in this article.

In the following stages, learning programs are designed, developed, implemented, and effectiveness is evaluated. All these stages are much easier to do well once the training needs analysis is completed in a thorough manner.

Training needs analysis for individuals

The training needs analysis process is highly similar for individual cases. Instead of an organizational goal, an individual or departmental goal is listed in step 1. This goal should be directly related to a higher level, an organizational goal to ensure the maximum impact.

In step 2, the relevant job behaviors are listed. When it comes to an individual job, job behaviors can be analyzed through a job analysis. The most-used approach here is the task inventory. For example, a receptionist has many duties, one of which is a hospitality duty. The tasks for this duty can be defined as follows.

Hospitality duty for a receptionist

The receptionist may have other duties as well, leading to a long overview of different duties with their related tasks. Based on these tasks, the job analyst or L&D professional can score the frequency, importance, and difficulty of the task. The information is gained by looking at the job description and talking to the manager and employees doing the job. This job analysis provides the input for step 2 and 3 of the process.

In step 3, the required knowledge & skills are defined. This can be based on the task inventory and can be supplemented by other information sources, including the ones we mentioned earlier.

Training needs analysis questions

We will conclude with a list of training needs analysis questions. These are relevant questions for the four different stages in our training needs analysis template.

Step 1. Define organizational goals diagnosis

• What problems are occurring in the organization?
• What is the organization trying to achieve?
• Which organizational goals require the biggest change in employee behaviors?
• Which departmental goals are lagging?
• Which individual performance goals should be improved?
• Can these problems be solved through different behaviors? 

Step 2. Define relevant job behaviors

• Which job behaviors contribute to the goals defined in step 1?
• If the listed job behaviors are ‘fixed’, does that bring us closer to the goals defined in step 1?
• Do the listed job behaviors align with our organizational core values?
• Which cultural cues reinforce undesirable behavior?
• What other influences play a role in reinforcing undesirable behavior?

Step 3. Define the required knowledge & skills

• Which skills are required to display the behaviors we defined in step 2?
• Which knowledge components are required to display the behaviors we defined in step 2?
• Once the listed skills and knowledge components are taught, will the relevant job behaviors always be displayed?
• What is hindering the display of relevant job behaviors once the listed skills and knowledge components are taught?

Step 4. Training

• Is all the information required to start the training design and development process present?
• Are there non-training alternatives that we can deploy that will have a similar effect?

Conclusion

This wraps up our guide on the training needs analysis, in which we presented a training needs analysis model and template which can easily be used by any L&D professional, learning consultant, trainer, or even manager. To learn more about learning and development, please check out our full Learning & Development Certificate Program at the Academy to Innovate HR!

FAQ

What is a training needs analysis?

The training needs analysis is a process in which the gap between the actual and the desired knowledge, skills, and attitudes (KSAs) in a job are identified.

Why is a training needs analysis important?

A training needs analysis and subsequent training can help in solving organizational problems that are caused by a lack of knowledge, skills, or attitudes.

How to conduct a training needs analysis?

A training needs analysis can be conducted in four steps 1) define organizational goals 2) define relevant job behaviors 3) define required knowledge and skills 4) training.