Training Needs Analysis: What It Is And How It Benefits Your Business
How do you currently decide what type of internal training you want your team to attend? It can be a challenge to make sure you are picking the correct training for each team member, and ensuring your team get the most benefit from the training you have selected.
One key way to ensure you have selected the right training for your organisation is to complete a training needs analysis. Let’s take a look below at what training needs analysis is, and how you can use one to benefit your organisation!
What Is Training Needs Analysis?
Training needs analysis is a process that a business goes through in order to determine all the training that needs to be completed in a certain period to allow their team to complete their job as effectively as possible, as well as progress and grow.
There are 3 key steps involved in training needs analysis to ensure your business is making the most of the process:
- Decide On Skill Sets
The first stage is to decide on the skill sets that you require all your team members to have in order to do their jobs properly. This means looking at every job role within your business separately and considering things like the different departments or levels of seniority which will affect this as well. - Evaluate The Skills Of Staff
The second stage is to look at all your team members and evaluate their current skill levels in relation to the skills you have laid out in the first stage of this process. This will allow you to see who is meeting your expectations, and who needs to complete further training in order to meet the expected skill level. - Highlight The Skills Gap
Now that you know where you want your team to be and the level they are currently at, you will easily be able to see the gap (if any) that has appeared between the two. Now you know what the gap is, you need to use training to help close that gap and ensure your team is at the level you expect them to be.
Benefits For Your Business
1. Identify Knowledge Gaps Before They Become A Problem
One huge benefit of conducting training needs analysis is the fact it can help you identify any knowledge gaps your employees may have before it becomes an issue. It’s better to highlight a potential problem and tackle it head-on, rather than becoming aware of the skills gap when an issue arises because of it.
The training needs analysis will allow you to take a proactive approach rather than waiting for something to go wrong before you realise there is a problem.
2. Helps You To Plan Your Training For The Year
Another huge benefit of training needs analysis is that it makes it much easier for you to plan your training for the upcoming year (or whatever block of time you work with). Once you have identified the skills gaps that exist in your business, and then all the staff members who need additional training in certain areas, it’s easy to pull together a training plan which will cover all these skills gaps.
Rather than trying to guess the type of training that will be most useful to your organisation, or who needs to complete the training, your training needs analysis will make the whole task much easier, and you can be confident that the training you have selected will make a direct impact on your business!
3. Highlights Training You May Not Have Considered
It can be hard to sit down and plan out a training schedule for a large organisation without completing some sort of background research first. You may think that you know the type of training your team should be completing, but training needs analysis could actually highlight a whole load of areas that your team needs training on that you never even considered before.
That’s why training needs analysis is so useful because it can highlight training needs you may not have considered before and show that you need to start offering training in different areas to ensure your staff are performing at their best.
Without the use of training needs analysis, you may never have considered a particular area of training, which could have severely hindered your business.
4. Ensures Your Training Is Focussing On The Right Areas
As we said above, it’s important to have concrete reasons for adding training to your training schedule, as you can’t just assume what is and isn’t important for your team to learn. Completing a training needs analysis will allow you to see exactly what you need to focus on, but it will also highlight the areas your team really don’t need any further training on for the moment.
If there are no apparent gaps in knowledge in a particular area, then running further training on it could be a waste of time and money!
5. Helps To Decide Who Should Attend Which Training Sessions
Another important step in planning training is to ensure the right people are in the right training sessions. There is no point in making everyone in your organisation attend every training session you run. It’s a massive waste of time and money for your business, and staff won’t be engaged with training sessions if they are frequently attending training which is of no use to them.
A training needs analysis will enable you to target the correct people for each training session, ensuring everyone is following a personalised training plan, so they get the most benefit possible.
6. Helps You To Prioritise Training Needs
When it comes to planning out your training, it can be hard to decide which training sessions are the most important. However, training needs analysis can help you pinpoint the training which needs to be completed ASAP, and which training can be left till later down the line.
When you think about the skills that each team member needs to have, you may want to prioritise these regarding how key they are. For example, if you have a customer-facing team, ensuring they have top-notch customer relations skills may be top of the list.
If you notice a gap in the face-to-face skills for some of these employees, it only makes sense that you would want to tackle this first, as this is a key aspect of their job role, and lack of training in this area could have a negative effect on your business.
All other training can be prioritised afterwards, but it’s important to get that customer relations training booked in and attended as soon as possible to make sure your customer-facing teams are top performers.
Anyway, the eBook 'How To Conduct An Effective Training Needs Analysis: A Step-By-Step Guide For Instructional Designers' is here to make clear everything about how Training Needs Analysis can benefit your organization at all levels!
Editor’s Note
At eLearning Industry, we know that building a strong training program starts with clarity. That clarity comes from understanding the requirements of your team. A detailed training needs analysis is essential for creating programs and courses that actually improve performance. You can design innovative programs that hit the mark by noting the skills your team already has and identifying skill gaps and areas where they need improvement. It encourages organizations to adopt a proactive mindset by prompting them to spot the gaps before they become problems. This assessment helps companies shift their planning from reactive to strategic, making it easier to pull together training programs for the year or upcoming months. It allows them to focus on growth and development instead of fixing mistakes after the fact.
We have also seen how this process supports organizational success over the long term. When done correctly, a training needs analysis becomes an essential tool for employee development. It helps teams understand their strengths and weaknesses and gives leaders a clearer picture of where to invest. Instead of relying on guesswork, a systematic and structured approach allows organizations to make informed decisions based on data, makes it easier to prioritize and align resources to their goals, and ensures employees attend sessions and programs that are relevant to them. Targeted training leads to quicker results and makes learning more engaging. Training needs analysis can also reveal areas you may not have considered, unlocking potential in those places. With this insight, your programs can become more ambitious at every level. We think this kind of impact is worth paying attention to.
