Training Needs Analysis

Organizations are constantly evolving and growing, and their employees must also evolve and grow. This change is supported by training and development. Human resource professionals who develop training and development will be responsible for performing training needs analysis. A training needs analysis is the process of identifying employee knowledge gaps concerning the desired training objectives.

Training Needs Analysis Steps

When conducting a needs analysis, human resource development professionals will often work with subject matter experts to determine the complexity of the problem and learning objectives. The first step in conducting a needs analysis is to figure out who the stakeholders are and whether a subject matter expert will be involved. Once all the necessary parties have been engaged, human resource development professionals will:

• Discuss, clarify, and determine the goal and desired outcomes of the training. A clear objective (or several) will be written to describe these goals. For example, at the end of the training, employees will be able to speed up production by 20 percent.
• Make connections between the desired outcome to the skills employees need to acquire. For example, to speed up production, employees need to learn to use a new software program.
• Identify what learners need to know to meet the desired outcome. For example, what are the specific functions they will need to know from the software program?
• Use data to identify what learners know and do not know. Are there learners who do know how to use the software program and the necessary functions? If so, what is their production, and how does it compare to the desired outcomes? These questions may find that the list of competencies needs to be revised.
• Identify how many employees will need to be trained. Consider how long this will take and what level priority this training will take.
• Determine how the training will be conducted. With the advent of online learning, many options are now available for training and development. Some organizations will prefer to stick with traditional face to face learning or on the job training. However, others may want to leverage the flexibility of online learning platforms. The teaching modality should be aligned with the desired learning outcomes.
• Consider the cost of this training and the benefits. To what extent will this training address the performance gaps? What will be the impact on profitability when all employees are trained? Cost factors include training time (unproductive time for employees), content development time or content vendor cost, travel, and logistical expenses.
• After the training, there needs to be an evaluation in place to determine whether the training made an impact on productivity. The training is only profitable if an actual change occurs. This data should be compared to the initial performance data obtained at the beginning of the analysis.

Use Trakstar Learn for your Training Needs

A learning management system that offers robust tracking and reporting can make training needs analysis easier. Learn is a learning management system that allows human resource development professionals the ability to track learner progress, report on engagement, and assessment scores. Request a demonstration of the Learn platform to see how you can quickly gather data to report on the impact of training solutions.