Designing Training Content Based On Your Organization's Current Needs: 5 Training Needs Analysis Best Practices
Part of a training needs analysis is to see what training your company needs to complete in order to achieve your success goals for the year and then facilitate that learning throughout your business.
This may mean that you will have to design and create training content and training plans for your staff in order to help meet these goals and close any knowledge gaps which are present.
Let’s take a look at all the stages you should go through from goal setting to actually creating your training content.
1. Discuss Your Company’s Goals
The first thing to think about when it comes to training needs analysis and designing new training content is to take into account your company’s goals for the next year, or whatever period works the best for your company. In order to work to your company’s current needs, you need to think about the business goals that the management team have decided on and create your training plan around these.
Think about the goals on a company-wide basis, as well as any goals which have been set for each department or each role within the company so that you can separate your training appropriately.
2. Think About The Skills You Need Your Team To Have
The next thing you need to consider is what skills you need your team to have in order for you to hit all the training goals your management team have decided on. If you’re trying to grow as a business, it makes sense that your team will also have to grow with their skills and knowledge in order to support this wider growth. This means you will have to base your training around supporting the skills that are currently missing from your team, or enhancing the skills that they currently have.
3. Assess Knowledge Gaps
As we said above, recognising the skills that are missing from your team will be what allows you to build a complete training schedule for the next year to ensure you hit your company’s training goals. Once you know exactly what skills your team does have, you will then easily be able to see the skills they don’t have and therefore will need training on.
You may also want to prioritise the skills depending on which company goals they tie up to, and whether those goals have any time limits set upon on them. You may also want to prioritise new skills that will need to be applied to the whole team, or perhaps the whole business, rather than those that will only apply to a couple of people, as these skills will likely have a wider effect on your business and how successful you are for the year.
4. Edit Current Content To Suit
Now that you know what skills you need to work on for your upcoming training plan, the next thing you need to do is create the content. You may not need to create all the content from scratch though, and you may be able to adapt some of your current training content to suit your new needs.
For example, if you have onboarding training content which goes through all the systems you use as a business, you can rework this to include any new tools or system you have brought in to meet your goals, as well as remove the training content which applies to any systems that are no longer suitable and used in your business.
Also, as you have assessed all the skills that everyone in your business has, if you discover there are particular skills in your business that everyone holds, you will be able to remove that section of training from your training plan for the year as it’s no longer applicable.
5. Create and Add New Content
The final step of the training needs analysis process is to create the new content required for the new training plan you have created. Here are just some of the things you can do to organise this new content and get your training up and running in order to meet your company goals:
- Purchase training that comes with new software or tools that you are bringing into the business. If the creators of these tools have their own training to bring your team up to speed on how to use them effectively, then it makes sense for you to use this pre-created training content. It will also be up to the software creators to keep the content up to date and reflect any changes that happen within the software, to ensure your team are always getting the most current training possible.
- For more general skills in your business, you may wish to purchase pre-made eLearning courses or employ instructors to come in and run classroom-based sessions.
- If you are looking to train on something more specific, then you may want to create your own custom eLearning content to ensure it reflects exactly what your business is looking to achieve.
