How Do You Conduct a Training Needs Assessment (+ Free Template) (PDF)

How do you know what the team responsible for marketing in your business needs to be trained to create ads that convince customers to purchase your product? Or if your IT team needs upgraded security training to ensure your business's security? However, if you're aware that you need to train your employees How do determine the most effective way to deliver the information?

This is where a training need assessment (TNA) is essential.

Jump ahead to this page:

•    What is a training need assessment?
•    Three levels of needs for training assessment
•      Analysis of the organization
•      Task/operational analysis
•      Individual analysis
•    How to do a training needs assessment

1.      Identify trouble spots
2.      Determine what requirements could be addressed through education
3.      Review, make recommendations and define goals

What is a needs-based training assessment?

It's precisely what it sounds like. An assessment of training needs is an opportunity to determine the level of education required by individuals or teams to achieve their objectives. Also, it helps figure out the best way to impart this education, and later evaluate if the education has indeed helped in hitting the original objectives. In the simplest terms: you need to figure out the ideal approach to implement a programme.

TNAs are typically utilized by HR, learning and development professionals to determine the gap in employees' expectations of performance and how they are currently performing. But, they may also be used by online course creators to identify what their target customers want to know and what they should do to best provide that information.

3 levels of training needs assessment

A thorough assessment of the training needs evaluates the need for training at three different levels.

1. Organizational
2. Task/operational
3. Individual

Analysis of the organization

The analysis of the organizational structure considers the organization as a whole when assessing training needs - including the company strategy and goals for the future.

Specifically, you examine the abilities, expertise that employees require to contribute to the company's development.

A good example of an organizational analysis would be noticing the customer satisfaction percentage isn't as high because of a newly implemented system which has made it difficult to manage ticket requests from customers. Perhaps your sales staff has very high turnover and poor performance in the past 6 months after the new leadership was introduced. You could be realizing that your business has expanded rapidly, creating several new teams, but they're not cooperating well, and that more training is required on the communication.

It is helpful to ask questions like:

• Where is training needed inside the organisation?
• What problem would training address?
• What specific group would benefit from this training?
• How will our organization develop in the next few years? Which training would we require to prepare?

Analysis of operations and tasks

Task analysis examines the what is required for the job vs. what employees do at their jobs. It involves reviewing job descriptions to determine the abilities and expertise needed to complete the job, as well as analyzing the current abilities and knowledge of your employees.

For example, doing an analysis of the tasks in your customer support team would mean reviewing the description of jobs for customer support employees, confirming performance standards (such as a specific minimum amount of time responding to a call or a specific minimum customer satisfaction score) as well as evaluating the knowledge, skills, and abilities needed to be a successful customer service specialist. The next step is assess how your customer support team is doing compared to these set expectations, and then suggest the training program based on this assessment.

Some questions to consider asking are:

• How does your current work performance compare to the norm?
• What is the best way to measure job performance to align with company goals?
• What operational problems are contributing to performance issues?

Analysis by an individual

An individual analysis focuses on how an individual performs in their role. Similar to task analysis, it is a search for differences between the expected performance as well as current performance. However, it's in an individual rather than a departmental scale. This can be done using data from performance reviews of employees.

Maybe customer support specialist Mark receives consistently low ratings for his work due to his lower satisfaction with customers and his slow response times. This may indicate an opportunity for training to help meet performance standards.

Or, individual employee surveys and interviews could be completed within the sales department that has the highest turnover rate to discover why it is happening. The training can be modified to meet the requirements of the individual employee.

The most important questions to ask are:

• Do employees possess the necessary know-how and abilities to reach standard of excellence?
• What's stopping employees from performing efficiently?
• What programs of training could help employees to meet the standards?

How do you actually conduct a training needs assessment

Okay, now that you know the three levels that your training needs assessment should include. How do you carry out your assessment?

The look of this can vary based on what you're conducting your training needs assessment to discover, and the work environment you're in similar to. The training needs assessment framework is intended for evaluation of the organizational structure. However, course creators can get a better understanding of a needs assessment for training. The assessment framework can be used as a framework and use parts of it in the form of whatever course you'd like to put in place. Let's take a look at what you need to do in order to pass the test.

Remember, the purpose of a training needs assessment is simply to figure out the kind of training that is required in your company, who requires the education, and also the best way to deliver the training.

1. Identify areas of pain

There must be clear goals to determine whether your training has been successful or not by the end of your program. You can't establish goals without understanding needs. You may have some idea of needs just from your personal observations. To be sure It's an excellent idea to collect data from your employees.

If you're a course creator expanding or launching your online training this could be a possibility for you too. Try surveying your audience for what they're looking for training in. In the case of example, if you have your own YouTube channel about dog training Ask your viewers what subjects they would like to learn about via an online course form. This can be a great information for you to keep at the forefront when designing your course. If you already have an online course try asking your students via the built-in feedback form what gaps they could learn more about after taking your course. Now, voilà! Now you have your new course topic idea.

Within companies there are a variety of methods to collect data about need for training. Surveys/questionnaires are easy to implement and yield fast results. Try Typeform or SurveyMonkey to gather responses or give employees a form they are able to fill out.

Other options include test-based focus groups, interviews, advisory committees, or document reviews. The goal of this stage is to determine what needs and/or pain points exist that could be addressed through a program of training.

2. Examine the needs that can be addressed by education

In the next step, you'll have to identify if training can fix the needs/pain points that you identified during step one. In step 2, you'll know where performance issues lie within the company, and what is not meeting the expectations of employees. However, these problems can't necessarily be fixed by training, and that's why this step comes in.

  Exemple 1  

Imagine finding out from employee surveys and performance reviews that the sales department is not hitting their targets. In further interviews and conversations with employees, you've discovered that this is because the sales staff isn't educated on selling the new product and isn't aware of the most effective ways to reach out to potential customers. This issue can be solved by the training of employees.

But, suppose you discovered that the poor performance was due to poor morale because lunch breaks have been shortened from 30 minutes to an hour minutes. Training isn't able to help fix (other other than perhaps educating management to confer with employees prior to making major changes).

  Examples 2  

An additional analysis sample could be on an individual level. For instance, a support worker is always receiving negative feedback from customers after service calls. This can be a major issue for both the customer and the support department , which you discovered in step 1. When you talk to the employee, further, you will realize that the person isn't aware of the more complicated aspects of the software and therefore they are unable to assist customers in this. The issue can be solved by training.

In contrast think about the situation where employee score is so poor because the employee isn't interested in providing assistance to customers. Often, the employee is not available when the issue can be resolved. This is an issue with motivation, and cannot easily be fixed by training.

Problems that cannot be solved by training management. Even if your initiative isn't able to fix the problem does not mean that another project can't.

Remember, the goal of this step is to determine what problems can be addressed through training, and which issues may need other solutions.

3. Assess, suggest, and set objectives

The last step is where you propose training strategies that will address the discovered pain points. When recommending training, you'll need to keep in mind the costs and stakeholders needed to implement your plan. What is the budget your company set aside for employee training? What would be the best method of instruction? Who should be involved? What are the timelines to be met? There are a few considerations in each of these areas.

  Budget  

Before you choose the training course you'll require an understanding of the budget available. Talk to stakeholders such as HR and management in order to establish a budget. There is a be required to convince the stakeholders that training is warranted in certain situations. You should calculate the ROI of training investments for the purpose of justifying costs.

Remember that it might not be simple to calculate what the benefits of a training investment will be. In certain situations it is necessary to compare performance before and after the training in order to determine the ROI after training has been completed. Also, you can work with the department's stakeholders to estimate the anticipated ROI (ROI).

  Timelines  

How urgent is the training necessary? If, for instance, part of your customer service team now needs to serve customers from Mexico It would be imperative to have Spanish education and training in place. On the other hand, if a few individuals in the finance department did not know the expense reimbursement protocols this might not be as urgent to create training in a hurry.

Make use of basic techniques for managing projects to design a learning schedule, working backwards from when training is required to be completed. Here at, we are awestruck by tools like Asana to manage tasks and get things done in time. Trello and Basecamp are also user-friendly options.

  Goals  

You will need to work with stakeholders to set targets for what successful learning means. When we look back at our examples, success for sales could mean a certain proportion of cold phone calls turning into qualified leads. Likewise, satisfaction for customer support employees might mean an increase by 20% in the satisfaction of their customers. If you don't set goals, you'll not know if the training program has been successful or not. So be sure to set them!

  Evaluation  

There are many methods of imparting information to employees. The best way depending on financial resources, the learning style of your employees as well as the level of training required. There are a variety of options, including video-based instruction, online courses employing trainers in person, studying documentation, practicing or shadowing. Additionally, if training already exists on the subject maybe updating the existing training to include new information can meet the needs of your company.

Inviting an expert to provide on-site training is an excellent option for those whose business is operating from offices. In certain areas, if the need for extensive training isn't needed, it is possible to consider practicing or shadowing as training alternatives. It may be that some abilities have been instructed but have not been used as often, so employees just require a routine of practicing and the time. If only a few individuals are struggling they can be paired with employees who are highly successful to help practice and develop the skills needed.

After evaluating all of the options for training, it is your responsibility to suggest the best training program(s) that will work most effectively to achieve training goals, in addition to addressing pain points. Make sure you keep the budget, timelines and the goals in mind before formulating your final recommendation.

When you've provided your recommendation, the training needs assessment has been completed! Next, it will be time to present the training and track the results.

Try your hand by delivering online training for employee training or your own course!