5 Common Mistakes You Should Avoid When Conducting A Training Needs Analysis

5 Common Mistakes You Should Avoid When Conducting A Training Needs Analysis
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Summary: Learn the mistakes you need to avoid when it comes time for your training department to complete a training needs analysis.

What To Avoid When Conducting A Training Needs Analysis

If you’ve decided to complete a training needs analysis as part of your company’s training planning, then it’s important to know how to best approach the whole process to ensure you get the most from your time investment.

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We thought we would take a look at some of the mistakes you should make sure you avoid as well, to make sure you conduct the best training needs analysis possible.

1. Not Making The Time For A Training Needs Analysis

The first common mistake that comes up when we’re talking about training needs analysis is just not making the time to conduct a training needs analysis in the first place!

It’s easy to put off tasks which seem time-consuming, but it’s important to recognise that training needs analysis is a vital task when it comes to your training planning for the year, and it’s something that you will need to repeat regularly to update your training every year.

Rather than thinking about it in a negative fashion and only thinking about all the time you will spend on the activity, why not think about the results instead?

A training needs analysis will allow you to plan the best training schedule possible for your entire company, and help you meet your company goals by bringing your employees' skills up to the level they need to be at. That’s why it’s so important to think about your Return On Investment rather than automatically viewing it as a waste of time because it requires a little time investment at the beginning of the process.

2. Not Planning Ahead

After you’ve decided to conduct a training need analysis in your business, then the next thing you need to do is make sure you create a plan to ensure the whole process is as successful as possible.

When creating this plan, the first thing you want to do is decide on the business goals that you want to tackle with your training for the upcoming year. These goals should be the points you come back to all the time to ensure that you're always working towards meeting them in everything you do.

You’ll also want to plan all the people you need to involve in the process to ensure it is as successful as possible. Speaking to different people from different departments and across your entire business may require some coordination, so it’s important to plan this out from the start to ensure everyone, who needs to be, is involved.

You’ll also want to clearly plan out any timelines involved, to ensure you start early enough to hit these deadlines and give yourself enough time to do the best work possible.

3. Not Gathering Information From The Entire Business

As we said above, it’s important to plan out all the people you want to involve in this process and make sure you bring in all the key decision makers that you need to ensure you get the best results possible.

It can be easy to try and limit the number of people you bring into planning sessions to try and save on time, however with something as important as a training needs analysis; you will need to bring in a few people from across your business.

As well as your upper management team, you will also need to bring in people from different departments across your business to get an accurate representation of all the skills and knowledge gaps from every team.

4. Not Documenting The Process

Once you have your training needs analysis process in place, it’s important to take the time to document that process. If you have settled on a process that has proved successful for your business, it’s vital that you document it so that you can reuse this process in the future.

Documenting the process will also mean that the next time you come to work through it, you will be able to see where you can make improvements based on what did and didn’t work in previous years.

5. Not Segmenting The Training

The last mistake you want to avoid when it comes to training needs analysis is segmenting the training that you are planning out. Again, taking the extra time to break up all your training by department, and even further down by job role, is a key part of the process to ensure that everyone gets the specific training that they need to be successful.

Don’t be tempted to try and plan lots of company-wide training in order to save time or make the process go faster, as the whole point is to think from the top of your business, all the way down through every team to pick out all the training you need in order to hit those company goals.