Speaker 1: Conducting a training needs analysis is essential for determining the training needs of employees. I'll explain how to do that in this video and also provide a free download of my training needs analysis worksheet. Hello, I'm Stephen Goldberg of Optimist Performance bringing you practical tips and ideas on leadership, team development and employee performance in the workplace. I created a new worksheet for conducting a training needs analysis. This kind of coincides with a video that's very popular on my channel on the responsibilities of a manager. And in that video I talk about the need to balance managerial skills, planning skills, organizational skills with people skills. Now in my sample worksheet I've added some of those competencies for management or supervision. But there's another tab, it's done in Excel and you have another tab where it's blank or you can just erase the competencies and add your own. Now where do you get those competencies from? Well you could start with a job description, you could look at my videos on creating a job description, download my job description template as well. And take those skills required to perform the job to be productive and then translate them into competencies. Another resource I use which I've mentioned in several of my videos is onetonline.org, I'll put a link to that in the description of this video. And that's a resource website from the US Department of Labor and I often use it to research job descriptions to help me formulate job descriptions or to look for competencies. And when you search for a job it'll bring up a list of jobs with those keywords and you could then look at a summary job description or you could go more detail and that's where you'll find a complete list of competencies for that particular role. Now what I have here is, I've just listed two competencies, one on communicates, listens, leadership style which I talk about a lot in my videos. So in the center, I call these performance factors, in the center you have the list of competencies and on the left you have the levels of importance and on the right you have the levels of achievement. Now this may look like a performance appraisal and you can actually use this format to do a performance appraisal and I'll cover that in another video on performance appraisals. And I'll also make a version of this for performance appraisals so subscribe if you're not already so you'll get notified of those videos and when you subscribe turn on the notifications so you do get notification. So the levels of importance, you'll notice here I have two little square boxes for each of the levels. There's five levels of importance from little importance, some importance, important which is your average rating so your middle and then you have major and critical. So why are there two boxes? Well the one on the left you would have the employee self-assess themselves first and then the same on the level of achievement. The level of achievement is seldom, sometimes, usually, most always and always. Now you could use your own terms of course. So again you have the middle rating. So the middle ratings are acceptable but you want to first establish the level of importance. So one box is for the employee and the one next to it is for the manager or the trainer if you have a trainer on a particular topic because sometimes you want to put a group of people. Let's say you have a customer service department and you want to have them all run through a specific type of customer service training. Well then you would have probably a list of topics that they would learn or competencies for customer service person and you could list those here and you want to check people's perception of what is the level of importance for each of those competencies and how do they perceive they're doing in that how productive they are in that competency. So it's not a test it's more of a way to explore with the person where their key needs are in terms of improving and when you do it let's say you have a group or a team of customer service people you may have different needs for each person so you want them to focus in on what they're going to get out of the training. So it could be used that way. Now I also have besides the Excel spreadsheet which is what this is a mock-up of I have a Word document with two pages. The first page is prior to the training and so is the second page actually but the first page is about having the person think through what are their needs you know what are they having problems with in terms of their job or what could they improve on to be more productive and you do that before going through the worksheet. And then after you do the worksheet and the idea is to compare your perceptions that's why there's these two boxes and then sit down and discuss it with them and then come to a conclusion of where the improvement where the focus should be on development for these competencies. And you want to narrow it down and the page two of the Word document is really a tool to just summarize okay where what are the top three competencies that you want to focus on or improve on and maybe what's the number one and then it asks the question well what would it look like if you became really good in that competency. So you want to visualize what you would be doing different or better and if people saw you from outside they observed you performing your job and what would they see different in terms of that skill set once you've acquired it. So you want to do those three things you know the pre-assessment, questionnaire, the assessment, and then the final discussion and agreement and so that's really what you need to do to conduct the training needs analysis. But you know the good part of this allows you to converse with the employee and come to a decision on where the focus should be on training and development and of course you could use my manager skills one. If you use the video and I'll put a link to that video on balancing organizational management skills with people skills and then you use that with your managers you will come up you already have it already set of you know the competencies already in my document my template. Every year I'd say you should you know sit down and discuss training needs with with employees and keep them always learning always engaging in some kind of improvement activity and training is a great way to do that. I hope you'll take action on this and it's beneficial to you as I mentioned subscribe to the channel turn on notifications check out some of the related videos go to the website where we have articles that coincide with these videos. Thank you for listening and we'll talk again soon.