What Training Needs Analysis Is And How It Can Benefit Your Organization

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Summary: Find out all about what training needs analysis is, and how you can use it to your organisation's benefit.

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.

How To Conduct An Effective Training Needs Analysis: A Step-By-Step Guide For Instructional Designers
Discover hints and tips on how to conduct the best training needs analysis for your company.

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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!

Originally published on January 17, 2019