Are you looking to grow or evolve your training program for the next 12 months and beyond? Before you do anything, it is critical to take the time to perform a training needs analysis or training needs assessment (TNA) to ensure that you are spending your company’s limited training dollars wisely and meeting the overall objectives for your organization.
To help you get started, we have provided the steps to get a comprehensive view of the training needs of your organization. At the end of your assessment, you should be able to answer questions like:
- What kind of training is needed and why?
- Who needs training?
- How will the training be delivered?
- What will be the success metrics?
- How will we build the training program?
- What will be the impact on the organization?
What is a training needs assessment?
A training needs assessment is a systematic process that identifies and evaluates the skills, knowledge, and abilities required by employees to perform their jobs effectively. Essentially, TNAs help organizations pinpoint the specific areas where employees lack the necessary skills or knowledge to perform their jobs effectively.
Training needs analysis can be conducted at various levels within an organization. At the organizational level, the strategic TNA aligns training and development initiatives with the organization’s strategic goals and objectives. It involves identifying skills and competencies needed to achieve long-term organizational success.
The departmental or functional level focuses on the training needs of departments, such as sales, marketing, human resources, or customer service, considering the unique requirements of each area.
A task-level or job TNA focuses on individual job roles or positions, determining the skills, knowledge, and competencies required for employees to perform their specific job functions effectively. Similarly, individual TNAs identify the training needs of individual employees, enabling them to perform their jobs more effectively. These may be part of performance appraisals or personal development plans.
Steps of training needs assessment
Step 1: Identify the goals of the organization
An unfortunate case that I’ve seen repeated time and again at various organizations is that many senior leaders do not fully grasp the positive impact that structured, well-executed training can have on their organization.
For some, it is seen as a nice-to-have or a process that will occur naturally via knowledge transfer from person to person. The phrase I often hear that is seldom true is, “Our product or solution is so easy; we don’t need training!” This is very rare, particularly for organizations experiencing rapid growth. Leaders typically want to focus their budgets on sales and marketing for their product, with the expectation that this will be the most effective way to achieve their organizational goals.
To ensure that senior leadership supports the training program from the outset, it is essential to demonstrate that investing time and budget in creating the program will yield positive impacts for the organization beyond the individuals receiving the training. The goals for a typical organization are set by senior leadership on an annual basis. Examine those high-level goals and consider the potential impact the program may have on them.
Here are a few examples of organizational goals, how a great training program can help achieve them and how to measure that success:
| Organizational Goal | How Training Can Help to Achieve a Goal | Measure |
| Acquire and retain SaaS customers | Effective customer training programs can have a direct impact on customer retention. | Measure the % of users trained per customer and compare that to those that were retained vs churned. |
| Generate revenue | For-profit customer learning programs contribute to revenue generation. | Track typical sales metrics, such as Total Revenue from Learning sold. |
| Become trusted industry experts. | Create generic industry training assets and promote them to gain a community of followers. Assets can include blogs, webinars, and training courses. | Measurement will depend on the types of training assets, including tracking responses and/or impressions of industry-specific social posts and blogs, as well as attendance at events. |
Step 2: Conduct interviews to determine learning needs
Surveying the entire organization’s needs for training enables you to focus your efforts on areas that are critical to meeting the organization’s goals. If you focus your program too narrowly, you may create a program that only meets the needs of some teams or departments, which could result in duplicated effort or unmet training needs.
At the first stage of planning your training program needs, please review what your organization requires to maximize your efforts, training budget, and resource utilization. When asking the questions, it is essential that the person conducting the training needs assessment clearly understands the organization’s overall goals, short-term priorities, and long-term aspirations, as well as those of the relevant departments. This will enable them to target training opportunities that will contribute the most to the overall success of employees, business units, and the organization.
Questions at this stage are typically broad, as the aim is to determine what training is required at a high level, so that you consider the whole organization and its goals rather than the needs of a specific role or team.
Training assessment questions include:
- What audiences/teams/departments require training?
- What broad skills/knowledge do you need to meet your immediate goals?
- What broad skills/knowledge do you need for your long-term goals?
- What other skills/knowledge do the audiences identified have or do not have?
- What training do you have available today?
- What are the skills/knowledge gaps from what is available today?
- What are the shortfalls of the training that is available today?
- Any professional certifications to be considered?
- What are the criteria for success for a training program?
Employee Training Topics: Proven Subjects To Empower Your People
Step 3: Identify desired outcomes for roles requiring training
After identifying the roles that require training based on the insights gathered during the interviews in step 2, the next step involves determining the desired high-level business task and/or knowledge that each role needs to acquire through training.
This requires continuous engagement with subject matter experts (SMEs) who possess the necessary expertise to determine the optimal outcomes. Ideally, this outcome should be expressed in a single sentence that incorporates the main business outcome required for the role; it may require some coaching with the SME to achieve this concise statement.
Suppose that, based on the interviews conducted in step 2, it was determined that onboarding for individual contributors is necessary. In this case, the high-level business outcome that training should aim to achieve is to ensure that new managers understand their role expectations, know where to find information and support, and can effectively navigate the company’s processes and systems.
Continue this exercise for each role identified as needing training in step 2.
Step 4: Conduct a job task analysis
The objective of conducting a job task analysis is to identify the learning objectives necessary for the training. During this stage, it is usually essential to collaborate with subject matter experts to break down the high-level outcomes into more specific job tasks. Although it may require some effort to elicit all the required job tasks, I recommend taking adequate time to ensure thoroughness, as this step forms the foundation for the subsequent efforts. However, you don’t need to get bogged down trying to ensure that the list is perfect, as you can continue to update these as you build the program.
To illustrate and building upon the previous example of onboarding for individual contributors, this stage would entail identifying specific aspects of the role expectations, such as where to seek information and support, how to navigate company processes and systems efficiently, and other relevant details. An example of a specific job task for a new hire that could be determined is: entering weekly timesheets using QuickBooks.
Continue the job task analysis for each role determined in step 2.
Step 5: Create learning paths
At this stage, you should have identified all the roles that require training and the corresponding job tasks that each role should be able to perform once the training is complete. The job tasks now need to be logically grouped into distinct learning components.
Suppose you determined that multiple roles require training in step 2. In that case, it will be essential to identify areas of overlap in job tasks, as you will want to logically group tasks into pieces of learning (such as courses, modules, or training assets) that apply to the broadest audience possible. The goal is to create a program that can be scaled and maintained effectively.
If there are additional job tasks that logically make sense to be grouped with a set of tasks, but they don’t apply to all the roles that require that piece of learning, consider adding optional modules or microlearning for just those roles to which it applies. For these optional pieces, I recommend considering modalities that are easier to maintain since the audience is narrower.
Continue to group the common tasks into pieces of learning until all that remains are the unique job tasks for each role. Then, for each role group, the unique tasks are broken down into pieces of learning, and all the learning pieces are arranged in a logical order to create a learning path. At the end of this process, you should have a training path for each role that requires training.
Of all the steps in the process, this is the one that benefits from the experience of a learning and development specialist.
Step 6: Report on training needs
Having completed steps one through five, you now have all the necessary information to report to your leadership team on the organization’s training needs. You can present a detailed training plan that has been tailored to address the specific needs identified.
Your efforts should help you create a clear and graphic representation of the proposed plan. You can then work collaboratively with your leadership team to prioritize the training paths, determine the development timeline, and devise an effective strategy for implementing and launching the program.
Creating courses after training needs assessment
After you have done your training needs assessment, you may find that the only option is to create your own courses. Training built in-house can be just as good and effective as professional training, if done correctly. The key is to take a measured, proven approach and to use professional tools.
One such tool is our LEAi, which enables HR, marketing, customer success, and other teams to convert existing organizational documents and presentations into content for various resources, including internal training sessions, eLearning, videos, and more.
LEAi features our clients love includes:
- Course content writer – Import content from your subject matter experts (SME), like documents, presentations, webpages and wikis, and LEAi writes the learning objectives and foundational content for you in seconds.
- LearnAdvisor – This feature continuously identifies learning best practices that aren’t being followed, provides suggestions on how to improve them, and offers to make the changes automatically.
- Microlearning creator – LEAi does the hard work of breaking large sections of content into smaller courses, making it easier for learners to take and understand.
- Test question generator – LEAi automatically generates assessment questions that test whether your learners grasp the most important aspects of your course.
- Translations – Quickly translate course content with AI suggestions and your own input.
- Interactive elements – LEAi transforms static content into engaging interactive flip cards, tabs, processes, and more, so you boost engagement, knowledge retention, and visual variety in your courses.
- Course updater – LEAi intelligently updates changes to your courses in seconds, so that you can eliminate the mundane task of updating individual courses.
If you’re looking for help with conducting a training needs assessment or creating internal training, and you need a professional tool to build courses quickly, please drop us a note!
