Why Conducting A Training Needs Analysis Is Required For Success
If you’re thinking of completing a training needs analysis to help create your internal training offering, you may be put off as it can seem like quite a substantial time investment, as well as requiring a lot of effort from both your management and internal training teams.
However, making the time for a training needs analysis on a regular basis is required to ensure your business stays successful! Let’s look at just 5 of the reasons why below!
1. Ensure You’re Always Running The Required Training Sessions
When it comes to planning out multiple training sessions for an entire organisation, it can be a challenge to know what the best training for your business is. It can be easy to fall into the trap of repeating the same kinds of topics year after year, thinking they are providing value to your business, when in fact your team aren’t learning anything new.
A training needs analysis is great for helping you create your business-wide training plan because you can easily see what training each staff member needs in order to bring them up to the expected level of competency for their job role.
Knowing the skill level management wants everyone to have, and the current gaps in knowledge will allow you to select training sessions which are going to help close those gaps and ensure everyone knows everything they need to know.
It will also give you a clear indication of the types of training you don’t need to run, as training needs analysis will also show you the knowledge team members already have, so you can clearly see what they don’t need any further training on. This will prevent you from boking pointless training sessions or training that is not going to have a direct positive impact on your business as a whole.
2. Maximise Your Return On Time Investment
When it comes to training costs, you may only think about the monetary value of the training sessions you choose to run and the Return On Investment (ROI) you receive financially afterwards. However, it’s just as important to think about the time investment you make with internal training sessions and how much return you get for the time you and your staff have spent on training activities.
If your internal training team wastes a lot of time researching, coordinating, and scheduling training sessions which aren’t of the highest relevance to your business, then that’s a huge time drain for your organisation. Trying to decide on a training schedule with no real guidance can be a massive problem, and training needs analysis can give you the assistance you need to ensure your team always books the most relevant training.
If you run training sessions which won’t have a positive impact on your business, this can also be a huge waste of time for every staff member involved. Not only will this mean time away from the regular work they have to complete every day, but it will also mean they will need to take additional time out of work down the line in order to complete the training they needed in the first place. This amount of time can be quite a lot per employee, and the number will only grow larger the more staff members that are involved. If you run internal training for a huge organisation, you could end up wasting hundreds of hours because of one poorly thought out training session! Time is money!
3. Allows You To Find Knowledge Gaps Before They Become A Larger Problem
You never want to think your staff members have any knowledge gaps in the knowledge they are expected to have for their job, but this will be something that happens quite regularly. Especially as the needs of your business change, or techniques advance, your team will constantly need to be brought up to speed on the new ways of working.
However, it is important to try and spot knowledge gaps as quickly and in as pain-free a way as possible. Training needs analysis allows you to go looking for gaps in knowledge, identify them, and start working towards getting rid of them straight away. This is a much more proactive approach to dealing with knowledge gaps rather than just waiting for one to make itself known, which could cause a huge problem for your business if that gap in knowledge causes further issues, such as a potential customer coming away from an interaction with a staff member with a negative impression of your business!
4. Create A Clear Training Plan For The Entire Organisation
Not only are training needs analysis sessions a great way for drawing up training plans for all of your current staff members, but it’s also an excellent way of coming up with onboarding training plans for any new members of staff that you may hire over a certain period of time.
Rather than sitting down and having to create a new personalised training plan for every new member of staff you hire, this will allow you to have all your onboarding training plans organised and ready to go when you make a new hire.
This will save your internal training team lots of time as they won’t have to start from scratch whenever it comes to creating a training plan, but rather they will have a list of all the required skills that are needed for that job role, and will know what training sessions need to be attended to bring that staff member up to the required level.
It’s also one less thing to worry about when bringing on a new member of staff, which can already be a busy time in a business, especially if you are growing and making lots of new hires at once.
5. Training Always Has Desired Outcomes
Sometimes, when you book a training session for your organisation, it can be hard to measure the actual outcomes that attendees took from that session. A training session topic can look like a good idea on paper, but if your team doesn’t come away with a useful outcome, then it was a waste of time.
If you create your training plan around the information you gathered from your training needs analysis, you can be confident that the outcomes of the training sessions will be useful to your business because they are helping to work towards the desired skills that management has decided on.
