60 Minute Training Needs Analysis

It’s a poorly kept secret that when performance is down, companies, specifically managers, will say “obviously these folks need training!” But it’s not obvious at all. It takes a lot of time, money, and effort to create and deliver training in the workplace and more than 75% of the time it is ineffective (according to McKinsey, only 25% of training programs measurably improve business performance).

If you’ve been trained as a training and development professional, you know that a needs analysis is crucial to identifying the real problem (e.g. do they not know how to do it, or are they not motivated to do it?), but not everyone knows how to conduct a needs analysis and they take a lot of time to conduct, so… Most people (training professionals and non, alike) skip over the needs analysis (just like they skip over evaluating the success of their training, but that’s an article for a different day) and simply jump right into designing and delivering training.

As a training and development consultant for nearly 30 years, I’ve often been called in to a company after someone has decided they know what the training need is, and they are simply “ordering up” a service that can design the training for them. After a few years of finding myself creating training that did not do the organization any good, I slowly created a list of questions to ask in advance of accepting a gig. The questions get at the root of the problem, identify the true needs of the audience, and define whether training will work or not. 

It’s in my best interest as a consultant to walk away from a training project that will ultimately fail than to say “well, let’s give it a shot and see what happens.” 

The Root of the Problem

A large publishing company requested customer service training because they came in dead-last in a customer service survey conducted by their professional association. The person requesting the training couldn’t tell me a thing about their day or how they got their work done (she wasn’t even in the same state as the CSRs), so I requested a few days to go to the call center and observe.

Once onsite it was easy to determine that it was the software these CSRs had to use that was making them cranky and ineffective. The publisher had purchased and integrated another publishing firm the year before, and Frankenstein’d the computer systems together to combine the imprints of both publishers.

“When did this problem begin?” would have been a great question to pinpoint where to begin the needs analysis.

Training the CSRs in customer service skills would not only have been ineffective, they would have been insulted by it. The organization had created a barrier to them getting their jobs done and that was the system that needed fixing.

The Needs of the Audience

A group of 41 field-based salespeople from across the United States were brought to the home office for two-days of sales training because they were not meeting their quota. During casual conversations with the salespeople it was learned that every two or three salespeople had the same support person in the home office who helped them with data gathering and proposal generation. It was soon discovered that the salespeople and their support people had never met nor had a discussion about timelines or sales goals. We managed to get their support people in for a meet and greet before the end of day two and a few months down the road quotas were being met.

Since two solutions were applied to the problem (training and the meet and greet) we won’t know for sure which solution was the winning strategy, but my money is on the relationship-building aspect.

 “Tell me how the salespeople get their work done,” might have uncovered this lack of communication and coordination that presented itself as missed sales – and required an entirely different process (not training) to solve.

Will Training Solve the Problem?

A retail organization with 36 stores throughout the northeast was suffering from 100% turnover at the hourly level (which is actually pretty good, but I did not know that at the time). The organization decided that what was needed to correct the high turnover was a training program for the managers to create a better work environment for the hourly workers. We created a 12-course curriculum that took a year to deliver. Eighteen months later we evaluated the success of the program by measuring turnover again. It had not budged.

Clearly, management behavior was not the problem. With a lot of data-digging we determined that the company really had a hiring problem. The majority of their hourly workers where high schoolers who left if they got a 25-cent raise at another company, had earned enough money to buy the concert tickets they wanted, or left for college. Considering you can only start working at 16 and you leave for college at 17 or 18, this company had a perpetual turnover problem that no amount of training – applied to any audience - would have solved.

If you’d like the full list of 21 questions I’ve developed over the last 30 years, I’ve just released an eBook that not only provides the question but the rationale and gives an example in practice. See it here.

I’ve also written a series of blog posts in the past that gives all of the questions; you can find it by searching on The Training Doctor and 21 Questions to Ask.

Here’s to better workplace training! 

About the Author:

Nanette Miner, Ed.D. is Managing Consultant of The Training Doctor, LLC a future-leadership development firm that believes Leadership Begins at Day One. She has over 25 years’ experience creating customized curriculums that get results.

Nanette speaks on Zero-Cost Leadership Development to professional and trade associations nationwide. 

Learn more about The Training Doctor's offerings, here, or give us a call at 843.647.6304 (US)