How to Conduct a Training Needs Assessment
The HR department undertakes the responsibility of managing people in an organisation, which includes making sure that every employee is at the top of their game.
For a company to achieve its goals, everyone needs to be the best at their work. Employees would need training that prepares them for future roles, while the management needs to be willing to invest in training employees to help the organisation grow.
As an HR professional, it’s your duty to conduct employee training sessions that enhance employees’ skills and provide them with new skills and knowledge that will improve their performance at work.
This is where training needs assessment comes in. Today, we’ll dive deeper into what it entails and how to conduct one.
What is a training needs assessment?
Training needs assessment (or training needs analysis) is a process wherein organisations and HR professionals identify the gap between the employees’ current knowledge and skills and desired knowledge and skills.
There will come a time when companies will have to do a training needs analysis, whether there’s a new system to be implemented within the organisation or sales are lower than usual.
Problems like these can be potentially solved by conducting a training needs assessment, but it’s not to say that it can fix every corporate problem. Only when the problem involves employees’ skills, attitude, and knowledge will training needs analysis be a viable option.
What are training needs assessment best practices?
To formulate a training needs assessment template, you need to know which practices will likely make an impact. Here are some of them:
1. Don’t focus on assessing training effectiveness:
Before coming up with training activities, start with the desired outcomes and then work your way backwards to identify which activities and tools will likely lead to these outcomes.
2. Manage your expectations:
For the training to be considered a success, it needs to satisfy all groups involved, including the management, employees, service users, training facilitators, and sponsors who financed the programme, among others. More often than not, one group may be less satisfied than the others, so you need to manage your expectations.
3. Taking an integrated approach:
Training programmes that put new skills in a broader perspective and integrate them with other organisation processes are more likely to be successful.
How to conduct a training needs analysis?
It’s tempting to go all out with the training programme, especially when you’re excited about how employees would react. However, moving forward without a training needs analysis will likely expose the faults and weaknesses of your strategy.
Here’s how you can start with your training needs process:
1. Identify organisational goals
The first thing you have to do is to identify and assess what you want to get out of the training programme. Then, list down your organisational goals on a micro and macro level.
That way, it’ll be easier to define your expectations from the training programme. Another thing that can help is chatting with executives and managers about their organisational or departmental goals for the coming months or years.
Are your plans for the training programme able to support these goals? Only after talking to concerned members of the organisations will you be able to determine if your current plans are sufficient or not.
2. Identify the training type
Once you’ve determined your organisational goals, take time to think about what types of training would be able to achieve those goals.
Training is usually broken down into these categories:
- Skills:
Skills training offers support in areas where employees are focused on a specific form of behaviour.
- Knowledge:
Knowledge-based training requires employees to experience and understand information. It’s often required for compliance training or product information.
- Practical:
Practical training is needed when employees’ skills and knowledge aren’t translating to their jobs. It’s supposed to help them practice their new skills in a safe and encouraging environment.
3. Gather insight
The common mistake of most HR professionals is keeping the process and results of the training needs analysis to themselves. If you want more insight, you have to be open to involving as many people as you can.
The more insight you have, the better as you have more resources for data and intel. For example, sending out surveys and doing casual interviews will give you the crucial information you need to build a better training programme.
After you’ve gathered as much information as you can, compare what you’ve learned against organisational goals and corporate expectations.
4. Decide how to measure success
Although it’s hard to measure training effectiveness, it’s important to have a metric by which you’ll measure the return on investment (ROI).
You can’t assign a numerical value to whether employees have a wider knowledge base or better soft skill set. However, what you can do is define what a successful training outcome should look like.
After the training, perhaps you can do a quick test to see if employees understand and recall the material. Some might consider a higher training completion rate a sign of training success.
However you decide to measure training success, use it as your guide as you work towards that metric.
5. Make your recommendations
The last part of training needs analysis should be a comprehensive write-up of what you’ve learned and how you can apply them to current and future training.
Training will always come with errors and shortcomings, so your analysis should serve as a guide to avoid committing the same mistakes and create better and more impactful training in the future.
Doing training needs analysis should give you enough information to boost your confidence when making recommendations for training programmes in the future.
Conclusion
Training needs assessments are integral to many HR programmes as they help you determine where employees need the most support. They’re critical in defining whether employees are equipped with the right skill set to meet the company’s objectives.
To conduct a successful training needs assessment, start with identifying organisational goals, appropriate training types, and gather as much insight as you can so as to be able to determine how to measure success, and make your own recommendations from there.
