Why a Training Needs Assessment is Important?

Great companies are always evolving. When it comes to growing your business, many changes require the reskilling of your workforce. 

One way to do this is through a training needs assessment (TNA). TNA is the evaluation of training requirements based on a comparison of the current skills and competencies of your staff versus the projected needs of your organization. Here are some specific reasons why a training needs assessment is important.

Top 5 Blogs of 2021

As we get ready to bid farewell to 2021, we've summarized our top 5 blogs of the year. Take a trip down memory lane, read one of the blogs you might have missed, or reacquaint yourself with some top tips!

Our top blogs of 2021 give us a good insight into what a lot of us were preoccupied with in the year, not surprisingly including Virtual Instructor Led Training, Training Needs Assessment  and eLearning ranking high on the list.

Create Training That Works: Three Levels of Training Needs Assessment

Have you ever felt like your company or team is missing something? You might not realize what that ‘something' is at first, but a training needs assessment (TNA) can help. A TNA is a critical step to assess the skills your organization needs, identify gaps between those skills and what training is required.

A Training Needs Assessment is the process to determine what an organization or individual needs in training. This could be anything from technical skills to soft skills. Training needs analysis is a process, not a product. There are three levels of training needs assessment.

How to Conduct a Training Needs Assessment

What is a Training Needs Assessment (TNA)?

Today’s workplace is fast-paced and demanding. Not everybody is willing to invest time in conducting a needs assessment; however, the practice is critical for enhancing workplace performance. Many businesses make assumptions of what their training needs are and how to conduct a training needs assessment.

This can have a significant impact on the success of training efforts because actions may address a symptom but not the real problem to be solved.

A workforce TNA is a way to collect information and to analyze the depth and scope of a problem. Assessments of a problem don’t have to belong or be intensive. If the issue is the rollout or change of a system or new job, the TNA can be reasonably quick. If there is evidence of a problem but no defined solution, or previous solutions have not presented satisfactory results, a longer look at other systemic factors may be required.

Components of a Training Needs Assessment

The Importance of a Training Needs Assessment and Learning Strategy

Change is necessary for organizations to succeed and grow. This requires the right technology, processes, and individuals to ensure opportunities available through change can be maximized. If you do not have time or resources to conduct a training needs assessment, you can still complete your project and release training to your employees, but without a corporate Training Needs Assessment, will the training achieve the objectives you wanted it to?

Training Needs Assessments will help you to make decisions about who needs the most impactful training, what that training should be, and how you can measure your success without spending money, time, and productivity you can’t afford.

Reasons to Conduct a Training Needs Analysis

A training needs assessment is done prior to the development of a training program, once a program has been running for a while, or after a change at an organizational or operational level is undertaken. There are three levels of training needs assessment, and it is important to understand why one should do an assessment and what should be done within that assessment to gain value from taking a step back and looking at the overall goals of the training engagement.

Do you know how much your training is costing you both to deliver and in lost opportunity cost?

Why Should I Conduct a Training Needs Assessment?

Training these days can be challenging for you to deliver to your employees who are working in a hybrid or dispersed way (either because of the circumstances of our global pandemic or because of your business model). If you are going to compete and meet your goals for expansion, growth, or recovery, training will be necessary for your team. In order to determine when and where to start, you need to analyze your current situation and consider what you will be doing in the future. You can do this with a training needs assessment.

How To Do a Training Needs Assessment and When Is It Used?

Training needs assessment is conducted in an organization where there are changes seen as significant enough to indicate gaps in performance for individuals (changing roles for example), an area or department (changing process, equipment, or responsibilities), or an organization (merging, acquiring, or divesting). These changes call for more than just communication but do not require an entire change or the development of a whole program. Training needs assessments are also likely necessary when there is a noticeable decline in performance for a group of people or teams without any discernible differences in processes, technologies, or organizational factors.

A good assessment always starts with asking three questions: why you think there is a problem, why are you looking at this now, and what are you expecting to see in terms of performance that you are not seeing. These should be considered before engaging in any formal assessment and should be as objective as possible. It is the objectivity needed that often requires a consultant who will have an outside view of the issues and experience in similar organizations and fields for comparison.

When Would You Conduct a Training Needs Assessment?

A good training needs assessment saves resources by channeling them to a measured need as against a perceived need. 

Do you often meet managers who say their team needs training?

It helps you focus your efforts to ensure that those with the maximum need get the help they merit. It guarantees that the right resources and training are delivered to the right need using the right delivery format, to the right roles to achieve the right results you need.

Top Tools to Writing a Training Needs Assessment

How to Gather Your Data and Ask the Right Questions

Why do you need to provide training to employees? Could it be the need to up skill them on a new technology roll out like Salesforce? Perhaps there is a new company-wide compliance training program that the team needs to get up to speed on. Or, are you trying to increase retention with a winning employee boarding program?