Quick & Dirty Training Needs Analysis

Need to figure out what training your organization needs...quickly...and with minimal fuss?   In recent years, we've thrown the Training Needs Analysis baby out with the bath water, but maybe there's a way to bring it back into practice.  Here's a simplified three-step process and some hacks that should get you there in a fraction of the time.

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Poor old Training Needs Analysis (TNA), so sad and dejected, no one stops by to visit anymore, everyone just runs by, late for yet another meeting, looking down at their smartphones, too over-caffeinated and stressed out even to say hi.  Maybe it's time for a make-over.  Let's re-imagine a TNA process that suits our frenetic pace. 

At its essence, a TNA is figuring out what knowledge and skills are most needed by workers and their leaders in order to execute key processes well enough to meet organizational goals.  When we know who needs what, we're able to design training and performance support solutions that drive business results in the most efficient and cost-effective way.  When we don't, we waste time and money delivering the wrong solutions to the wrong people, in the wrong way.  At a time when the L&D field is shifting towards a curated ecosystem approach, and with budgets and resources stretched thin, it's never been more important for us to have insight into the needs of our learners.

The upfront investment in a TNA is worth every minute and every penny spent, and yet organizations rarely conduct them.  Why?  They can be time-consuming to do well.  It can be challenging to get people to provide input.  Organizational needs change so often that TNA findings can quickly become obsolete.  These are the most common reasons cited, and there is some merit to them.

So is it possible for us to streamline the process, so that we get maybe 80% of the benefit for say 20% of the time and effort normally required?  If a TNA could be conducted more quickly and easily, maybe L&D professionals would be more likely to make the investment.  I'm probably fooling myself but it's worth a try.

Let's start by breaking the process down into three fundamental steps: (1) defining and prioritizing competencies, (2) gauging and prioritizing needs, and (3) curating learning content.

1. Define & Prioritize Competencies

If you don't have a good competency model that lets you know what knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs) are relevant to a set of jobs/processes and what observable behaviors are associated with each of them, it's going to be difficult to assess learning needs.  A robust competency mapping project could take 2-4 months, but let's see what hacks we can implement to cut that down.

1a. Brainstorm activities and tasks for key business processes.  You could start by looking at any existing process maps, standard operating procedures (SOPs), and job descriptions for clues as to what the key business activities and tasks are.  Ultimately, I find it's faster and more effective to pull a few incumbents and their managers into a room (or virtual room), show them a process map, and have a 45-minute brainstorming session, perhaps over lunch.  I ask them to walk me through the process and describe what the key tasks are, where things often go wrong, and where a task is especially critical and/or frequent.  In a manufacturing setting, I would actually walk the production line with them, but with more abstract business processes (e.g., sales process), I settle for whiteboarding in a conference room. 

1b. Prioritize based on criticality and frequency.  I take the output of my brainstorming meeting and organize it into a survey, then I send that back out to the SMEs for a quick check.  In the survey, I also ask them to rate the criticality, frequency, and difficulty of each task/activity.  Ones that float to the top as being more critical, frequent, and difficult are going to get the most attention from me.  If there's no time for a survey, here again I can just sit down with a few incumbents and ask the same questions.

1c. Define knowledge and skills needed to succeed.  I could also ask the incumbents to help me define what knowledge and skills are needed to succeed in each task/activity.  Normally, though, I would just work with one or two to help me flesh that out into a list of behaviors, which map to the major tasks/activities.  It might take us a couple of rounds to wordsmith it, but not much more than that.  This list gives me a quick and dirty competency map that I can begin using to design a learning pathway.

So far, we've hacked our 2-4 month long competency mapping odyssey down to a 2-week walk in the park. That's a good start.

2. Gauge & Prioritize Needs

If I want to be a little more scientific about it and narrow down my list even further--and yeah, I do--I would take the additional step of gauging and prioritizing needs.  Again, this could be a very lengthy process, consuming another 2-3 months, but we've got some hacks for that too.

2a. Survey target employees.  I take my prioritized (and therefore short) list of behaviors (mapped to key competencies) and create a brief survey that I send out to incumbent employees.  Actually, I create it and then ask the managers to send the survey out to their employees, so that I get a decent response rate.  The survey simply asks them to rate themselves in terms of their competence and confidence in each of those behaviors.  For example, someone might rate themselves a four out of five on "Resolves complaints in a manner that enhances customer satisfaction" and might indicate that they have 80% confidence in that self-assessment.

2b. Survey their managers.  In a second version of that survey, I ask managers to rate their employees on the same observable behaviors.  Ideally, we would ask them to evaluate every employee individually, but that would take too long and would be cumbersome for managers (who already don't like completing performance appraisals), so I settle for them assessing their entire team as a whole.  They can do this online in five minutes. 

Surveys have gotten much easier to conduct these days, because of cloud-based, SAAS tools.  For small samples, I still use an Excel spreadsheet as a survey form.  You could also put a spreadsheet up on GoogleDocs or SharePoint.  Regardless, creating and deploying the survey is relatively quick and easy these days.  Pick whatever will work best with your audience and organization.

Here's a mocked up example of my quick and dirty survey results:

3c. Prioritize learning needs.  What can be slightly more complicated is interpreting the results of the survey.  Spoiler alert!  You're going to find that managers perceive certain learning needs to be critical, while their employees don't agree whatsoever, and vice versa.  That's why I want to survey both groups.

I advocate for prioritizing (1) what employees and managers have agreed are the biggest gaps, then (2) what the employees have said are their biggest gaps (but managers didn't), and then (3) what managers said were the biggest gaps (but employees didn't).  Obviously, the learning needs that neither group felt were important can be tossed out or "de-prioritized," to be more civilized.  Your priority list is getting even smaller now.  Building, deploying, and analyzing the results of the survey might have taken you 2-3 weeks, but if it helped you cut your list in half, it probably saved you at least that much design and development time.

3. Curate Learning

Once you've got your short list of learning needs, now invest the time into designing an intervention or learning pathway that closes the most critical gaps.  If you are trying to warm the ocean by addressing every learning need under the sun, your efforts are likely to be diluted and ineffective.  But armed with your much smaller list of priorities, you can bring to bear more of your energy and laser-focus it on a much smaller pool of water.  The results will make you look like a rock star and will significantly help your organization achieve results sooner.

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Please join me in giving our venerable TNA process a make-over...not just a new wardrobe and a new hair style--the quick and dirty process I outlined above--but let's really think about how we can leverage today's technologies to streamline the process, scale it, and make it something that is plugged into our ongoing business processes, so that training needs float to the surface in real time, and learners can be connected just-in-time with relevant and impactful learning experiences.   Some technology companies are already trying out some different approaches...more on them later.

So if you have ideas and experiences to share, please post a comment...and don't forget to wave hi (or Like) as you run past that TNA sitting in the corner, looking at you with those puppy-dog eyes.

Gus Prestera, PhD

Coming up: Please check out my article: How to Simplify Your Life with an All-In-One Training Document, as I guest blog on Mimeo, starting April 18th.