When conducting training needs analysis, it’s important to think about it in terms of the different levels of your organisation. Not only will this make it easier for you to work through all the levels from an organisational point of view, but it will also help ensure that you don’t miss any vital information along the way.
The first thing you want to think about when conducting a training needs analysis for your entire organisation is any company-wide training that you may need to provide. While most of your training needs will be based on the department or job role that a person belongs to, there will be some skills that you need everyone in the company to possess.
This could be things like fire safety training and knowing what to do in the event of an evacuation, or how the use the specific software systems that you use as a business. These are essential skills and need to be considered when you are conducting your training needs analysis.
Even though it may be your management team who are conducting the training needs analysis for your entire business, it is still important that they take the time to think about their own training needs and what they will need to complete training-wise to ensure they are meeting the company’s standards.
They may have further training that they need to complete depending on which departments they are the managers of, but it’s important to think of the management team as a whole first, and then, what training they need to aid them in those roles.
This could be split up further depending on the level of management they are, such as a department manager or a team leader, as each management role will have different skills that it needs to excel at.
The next thing you want to think about is the training needs for each department within your business. Each department will be broken down into the further job roles, but there will be overarching training that will apply to each job role within a department.
It’s important to think about the skills that you need each department to have in order for your business to be successful. Your Marketing and Sales departments will need to have different skill sets to bring in potential customers and close those sales. Customer-facing staff will need specific training to ensure that all your customer interactions are up to your required standards. Your HR team will also need specific training on things like dealing with hiring and best practices when it comes to employee data management.
It’s important to think about all this department-specific training as this will ensure that all your departments are performing at the top of their game.
The next level of your business to consider is all the individual job roles that exist. This may take a little bit longer than the other stages, as chances are you have lots of different job titles in your company. Though, it’s important to take the time to think about each of them, in turn, to ensure you identify any knowledge gaps that may be present and then offer the correct training to counteract them.
Once all the department-wide training is out of the way, think about the skills you need each person to have. There will be different skills and tasks that you had in mind for each specific job role when they were created in the first place, so make sure your training needs analysis reflects this and provides the correct training.
The last thing you need to think about is the training plans for any new members of staff which you need to onboard into your business. Creating an onboarding plan for new team members will mean thinking about training from a number of different levels. They will need lots of training to ensure that they are brought up to the standard that you envisioned for the job, and this will include company-wide training, department-specific training, and role-specific training.
This may be one of the most important levels of the whole process because you need to make sure that any new hires are brought up to speed as quickly and efficiently as possible.