Speaker 1: Hello everyone, my name is Sean McKesson, and today I'm going to be talking about how to conduct an effective training needs analysis. What is a training needs analysis? This is a question we get quite a bit, and very simply stated, it's a way of gathering data in a structured manner to effectively build a training plan from that data. There's a lot of ways to go about this, and there's some best practices that we've learned as an organization that we'd like to share on this quick video. Why would anyone want to do a training needs analysis? That's a great question, the root of everything. First it defines and prioritizes the greatest areas of needs, great to know that. It allows you to identify performance and skill gaps that you may or may not have known about, allows you to develop data where you can actually evaluate performance measures. It's integral to determining the cost and the benefits of training, so you can measure a return on investment, obtaining management support, it increases the chances of reaching learning goals, and it improves employee morale. All of these are really good reasons why instead of just jumping into building a training plan, you want to do an effective needs analysis, so that you're either spending your money well or you're spending your time well. The process, as we have found to be effective, falls into four categories. First, we're going to identify the business goals, that's step one. Step two, we're then actually going to gather the data. Step three, we're going to assess the training solutions that are available, and then we're going to build a training plan based off the results that we've seen and comparing that to our business goals. Without further ado, we'll go straight into step one, identifying those business goals. We're starting with the end in mind. You'll want to start by taking stock of the organizational goals and deficiencies that are known throughout the organization. There's a couple of places that will help you start by categorizing what you're looking for. What are your organizational targets, sales goals, operational output? What are your department specific goals, if you have a manufacturing department or you have an operation staff that has a certain service level agreement? Or outside influences, whether it be compliance standards, legal things that are going to be coming down the pipe. These things are really good ways to identify what are those goals that you were trying to achieve, and then is there a challenge or opportunity that may be solved with training in any of these areas? This will help us identify what opportunities we really will have for training. There's a great model out there, the KSA model, and what this means is if one of those challenges comes down to knowledge, skills, or attitude gaps, then training is the correct solution. If it's not one of these three things, training may not be the single solution here. It may be a process issue. It might be a product issue, but if it's knowledge, skills, or attitudes, then we can change that with training. With that in mind, now we want to gather the data. We're going to step two. We're going to understand those goals of the organization or the departments, and then we're going to find out what we actually need to deliver. We want to do this with an open mind. A couple of ways, the big three, if you will, best three ways to get this information that we've seen after doing this for years is surveys and questionnaires is one. SurveyMonkey is a great tool. There's a lot of survey tools that will help you build this internally or using a partner like New Horizons. Second is leadership and management interviews, going to that middle level of the organization or top of the organization and seeing what the perspective is from those leadership roles. Then, finally, there's the focus groups where you can get a group of the knowledge workers, the people who are actually doing this day-to-day, and get their perspective on what training needs are there. Between the three of these, you get a really holistic view of what training needs are out there. Other things that you may want to consider, document and process reviews, observations, actually sitting down and watching somebody do the work. Performance appraisals, whether you have monthly or quarterly reviews, how are people graded, how can they improve? Using tests and assessments is also really key. You don't want to just ask how training was. You want to assess how effective it was, and you can do that by testing the actual skills that they've learned. Then, one thing that I don't see a lot of but I'd love to see more are advisory committees, getting groups of employees to actually give their feedback. A couple of ground rules that I like to set, begin with the end in mind. Think about those goals and build your questions, build your interviews around that. Set timelines, set a deadline, make sure that everybody stays on task so that you can get the most data. Then, diversify datasets. When you're asking questions, make sure you have open-ended questions as well as closed-ended questions so you can get some more tangible data as well as some of the more holistic information that will help you make some smart decisions about training. Some questions you can ask, what are the goals of the business, the department, the individuals? What kind of teaching style does the target audience best respond to? What kinds of training resources do you already have available that you might utilize? Just a few examples of questions you might want to start figuring out the answer to and incorporating into how you are building surveys or building out interviews. If you don't know the answer to any of these questions, ask anyway. Or if you don't know for sure but you think you might, don't assume. Step three, we're assessing the training options now. Now we've gotten the data, we've compiled how many students or how many potential employees want what training. What we can do is start looking at what the actual options are for training. First thing you want to do is take those business objectives that you found out at the beginning of this process, compare that to the data. Does it tell you what you expected or does it tell you a different story? And connect those data points, the objectives and goals to where hard and soft costs come from. If I'm you, I might want to pause on this screen and take a look at this really nice cheat sheet of hard costs that you might increase or decrease as well as soft costs that you might increase or decrease. Again, really good cheat sheet. I encourage you to pause this and come back to it and take a look and see what resonates with you and your team. Once again, coming back to the KSA model, knowledge, skills, or attitudes. If in comparing the goals and objectives to the data that you found, the solution seems to be telling you that knowledge, skills, or attitude gaps can be filled to improve the likelihood of meeting those objectives and goals, you have a clear solution and it's told you exactly what you wanted to find out. And then you can recommend a solution. And that starts to entail building a training plan. So now that you've identified all this, you're connecting the dots, getting buy-in is huge. Either you're going up and you're trying to explain this to your C-suite or you're trying to get buy-in from the rest of the organization. Show your work, show the raw data, show that you've put in, you've done this in a logical way, visualize that information so it's really easy to read, and then connect those hard and soft costs that we talked about to those goals. What dollar amount are you actually gaining or subtracting on the top line or the bottom line of the organization? This will help you get that buy-in from everyone within the organization from the top to the bottom. And then making recommendations for how you're going to be delivering training. Think about all those things that you've discovered, but you'll be recommending training delivery methods, how people are going to be trained, the personnel that's going to be delivering the training, internal or external, technology trends, learning gaps, deficiencies that you've found, regulatory requirements that you need to address, whether it be compliance, sexual harassment, anti-harassment, things like that. Last thing I'll leave you on is this is a great recommendation if you're really interested in this topic. I would highly recommend the book Return on Investment in Training and Performance Improvement Programs by Jack Phillips, one of my go-to training bibles. And yeah, you can learn a lot more from this. This was a short introduction to this topic. If for whatever reason you did have any questions, I am more than happy to help out. Feel free. I've put my phone number and my email here. Reach out and we can help you. Otherwise, have a great day. Thank you so much.