5 Examples Of An Effective Training Needs Analysis

5 Examples Of An Effective Training Needs Analysis
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Summary: Find out the steps you need to take so as to ensure your training needs analysis is as effective as possible.

What An Effective Training Needs Analysis Really Looks Like

If your business is interested in completing a training needs analysis in order to plan out its training calendar for the future, then it’s important to know how to complete the process effectively. We’ve picked 5 things we think you need to be doing to ensure your training needs analysis is as successful as possible.

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.

1. Think About Why You Want To Do Training Needs Analysis

The first thing you want to think about when it comes to an effective training needs analysis is why you want to do the process in the first place. You may be tempted to do something merely because it sounds impressive or you think you should be doing it, but this can lead to a lot of wasted time and effort, especially if you don’t have a clear goal in mind throughout the process.

Here are just some of the reasons you may decide to conduct a training needs analysis within your business:

  • You want to focus on your training programme to ensure that you meet your company goals for a set time period.
  • Ensure you are running training which has a direct, positive result on your business.
  • Make sure you are not wasting time on training which won’t be useful in the long run.
  • Help you determine the people within your business who need to complete training, and what training they need to complete.

2. Organise Who You Need To Involve

If you decide that training needs analysis will be a useful tool for your business, then the next stage is to ensure that you have all the correct people involved. You want to make sure you get input from all the relevant parties to get the best results possible.

This may require a little coordination and organisation to get everyone working off the same page, but it will be worth it in the long run, as a little time investment will ensure you get the best outcome from this whole process.

Think about all the different people you will need to include to get a good picture of the training needs of the entire business. You will probably need representation from your management team, including department managers to ensure the individual needs of each department is represented. You will obviously want to include your Internal Training team as well to ensure everything you decide is possible and fits into the wider training schedule for the business.

Plan everyone that you need to be involved from the offset, and make sure to include them in the entire process rather than having to make changes midway through.

3. Never Forget Your Company Goals

One of the main reasons you have probably decided to do a training needs analysis in the first place is to ensure that you are meeting the company goals that have been set out for you. This is why it’s important to always have these goals at the front of your mind whenever you make a decision based on the data you have gathered during the training needs analysis.

Think about how a particular type of training or skill will improve a process and therefore help you meet a specific goal. If you can’t trace a line back to a company goal, then you probably need to rethink your working.

4. Select Trainable Skills To Work

As part of your training needs analysis, one step will be to think about all the skills you would like your staff to have in order to meet all your company goals. However, some of these skills may be easy to enhance with training while other ones may be more of a challenge.

This is why it’s important to look at the skills you really want to work on and the ones that you can marry up with some sort of training. You may not be able to work on every single skill you would want to improve, not in one training needs analysis process anyway, so that’s why it’s important to choose the ones which will be easier to target.

5. Prioritise Your Training

While we’re talking about prioritising, it’s also important to prioritise our training for your upcoming training calendar. You may have lots of different training sessions which you could schedule to tackle knowledge gaps in your business, but you may not have the time availability or the budget to actually run all this training.

That’s why you need to look at which skills and company goals are a top priority and schedule any training you do decide on around this.