Developing professional skills in your staff is an incredibly important part of corporate growth. Identifying deficiencies or areas for improvement in the skills, knowledge and abilities within the business is an essential but often overlooked catalyst for growth.
But just training new starters and existing staff on new tasks alone isn’t enough to keep your business moving forward. That’s where Training Needs Analysis (TNA) comes into play.
This assessment provides key insights into the gaps in your team’s knowledge. To conduct an effective analysis, ensure your business leaders have completed our Train the Trainer course.
Now, though, let’s explore needs analysis more to define it and explain why it’s so important.
What is TNA in Training?
Training needs assessments are designed to help businesses define current skill and knowledge levels in relation to the desired standard.
But there’s more to the story of TNA than skills gap analysis. Used as a core tool in L&D, needs analysis also assists in highlighting the level of training programmes necessary.
Robust assessments should highlight deficiencies and prioritise the most appreciable areas for improvement. Not only that, TNA should also consider the costs of training and provide a return on investment for the development.
To summarise, following the analysis, you will have a good idea of where training is required in your business. Plus, you’ll also understand which areas could stand to improve most, what it could mean for productivity, and your bottom line.
But when should you be scheduling training reviews?
How Often Should a Training Needs Analysis be Conducted?
It’s good practice to run development interventions before completing any wider learning in your business.
Ensuring your trainers are as knowledgeable as possible about tasks, legislation, modern working methods, and more is important for fostering the best talent. It also means that new starters get the benefit of premier guidance from the beginning of their careers.
However, there are also more defined times when analysis could be pertinent. These include:
- Following a hiring process
- After performance reviews
- When performance levels begin to slip
- As part of career development plans
- When roles change
- To capitalise on industry trends
But it’s also important to highlight that not all needs analyses are created equal. Different skills, outcomes, and environments require different approaches.
Let’s take a look at some nuances of training now.
Proactive vs. Reactive Needs Analysis
Two core types of analysis to be aware of are proactive and reactive. But what are these approaches, and what do they look like?
- Proactive needs training analysis highlights areas for improvement before the deficiency becomes a priority. The analysis should then frame learning strategies to bridge knowledge gaps.
- Reactive training usually follows a business change or through an individual training request.
It can be more difficult for organisations to spot opportunities for proactive training. But, the effective data gathering attached to TNA helps crystalise these areas. Effective data gathering can include exercises like:
- Worker surveys
- Interviewing individuals from across the business
- Knowledge assessments
- Observations
- Consumer feedback
- Focus groups
Reactive training opportunities are more pronounced. These usually result from an employee, manager, or business owner asking for training to be carried out. Reactive training can also be necessary when individuals exit a business, leaving an obvious skills and knowledge gap behind.
Taking a proactive approach to training in your business is best for driving staff development, harbouring growth, and preventing skill gaps. However, employing a good mix of proactive and reactive training procedures can also work well.
A blended approach ensures less key-person dependency and wider knowledge banks within your company.
Learning Needs Analysis vs. Training Needs Analysis
Training and learning needs analysis might sound like interchangeable words to mean the same thing. But there are subtle differences between them.
- Training needs analysis is a framework process for identifying and bridging knowledge gaps. It allows employees to perform their roles better and helps stimulate corporate growth.
- Learning needs analysis, on the other hand, is more individual-led. Centred on personal and professional development, it considers personal learning styles and goals.
It helps to think of training as being related to business performance, whereas learning is more about personal evaluation and development.
But let’s go deeper and analyse the differences between TNA and LNA in more detail.
| Aspect | Learning Needs Analysis (LNA) | Training Needs Analysis (TNA) |
| Purpose | To identify the broad learning requirements across individuals. | To determine specific training needs to address skill gaps in relation to ideal levels. |
| Scope | Comprehensive, focusing on long-term development and overall knowledge growth. | Specific, targeting current skill deficiencies and performance improvement |
| Approach | Holistic, considering career progression and personal development. | Focused primarily on job-specific skills and performance needs. |
| Outcome | Creation of a detailed learning plan, including diverse learning interventions. | Development of targeted training programs to bridge specific skill gaps. |
| Analysis level | Personal and unique to each individual’s goals and learning style. | Team level to align with organisational goals. |
| Steps Involved |
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Training Needs Analysis Example
A good example of when a training needs analysis would be helpful could come from a manufacturing business facing increased competition or ambitious growth goals.
Identifying skills gaps in core areas can give performance and productivity a timely boost to stay ahead in a congested market.
Whereas, LNA is useful when an employee takes action to improve their communication skills (for example) in order to progress to a management position. This shows that the individual has identified an area for personal development to enhance their career pathway.
In both these scenarios, implementing SMART goals throughout the development process can help keep training on track and quantifiable – both in terms of knowledge enhancement and ROI.
Importance of a Training Needs Analysis
As we said at the start, training is important for every business to stay up to date with industry standards. Tasks are changing, but so too are workers.
Recent statistics show that Millennials and Gen Z employees prioritise workplace training more than other generations.
In addition, the same report found that two-thirds of 16-34-year-olds feel training provisions and development opportunities improve their commitment to an employer.
When future workforces care this much about development, employers need to be sure that team leaders and line managers effectively distribute valuable insights and manage knowledge gaps when they occur.
Additionally, there are even wider implications for not choosing to upskill your workforce, especially in industries with ever-shifting landscapes. Businesses in the energy sector, for example, are arguably feeling this pressure more than any other industry.
Recent statistics from City & Guilds research show that 46% of energy sector workers believe they lack the skills to support the shift to a zero-carbon energy system by 2035.
Types of Training Needs Analysis
Training needs analysis generally consists of three core development areas:
- Knowledge: Particularly important for businesses that employ staff with minimal work experience – the hospitality sector would be a prime example. Because restaurants and bars have specific compliance requirements, workers need role-specific knowledge.
- Abilities: It is hugely beneficial to develop an employee’s ability levels through training needs analysis. This area of development could focus on abilities like decision-making or time management.
- Skills: A Government survey showed that 36% of all vacancies in 2022 were related to skill shortages. Enhancing hard and soft skills is a crucial element of training needs analysis.
However, because every role and person is different, the quantities of each core training type required for your employees may vary.
Taking our retail new starter example from above, because the main developmental goal was product understanding, the knowledge stage of the training would need to be more robust than the ability or skills sections.
Varying levels of comprehension and task difficulty around the workplace make the quality of your training even more important. At TSW Training, we encourage employers, tutors, team leaders, and managers to take our Train the Trainer course. Education helps gatekeep the quality of training in your business.
What are the Training Needs Analysis Models?
Now that we know the different types of training needs analysis, let’s take a closer look at some methods that can be employed to complete the overviews:
- Competitive analysis: Compare your business with your competitors. How do your company’s knowledge and performance levels stack up against others? Is there anything you can learn from top-performing firms/individuals?
- Observation: Check over how your team is performing certain tasks. For observations to form a vital part of your training profile, employees must understand these are not disciplinary measures.
- Interview: Speak to your team and engage with key stakeholders. This is your opportunity to canvas your business to get a feel for how people perceive the company and their role within it.
- Questionnaires: In addition to interviewing, surveys or questionnaires should be sent to ascertain how confident staff are when performing business-critical tasks.
- Key performance indicators (KPIs): Targets can be anything from sales or production figures to customer satisfaction scores to health and safety KPIs. However, they are important tools in training as they act as critical benchmarks for progress.
- Performance reviews: Regular performance reviews give you a chance to encourage staff. However, they can also be excellent exercises for determining where training may be needed.
- Focus groups: Facilitate open group discussions where employees and stakeholders feel confident sharing holes in their knowledge.
- Customer feedback: Customers highlight where performance might be slipping long before most internal reviews. Leverage this feedback in your training sessions to reference real-world scenarios and role-play correct responses.
- Role analysis: How have certain roles in the businesses augmented over time? Do those changes require further support or education?
How to Conduct a Training Needs Analysis
There are many ways to complete a need analysis for training. However, our tried and trusted approach sees employers, managers or SMEs work through four core areas:
1. Define Learning Objectives
Defining learning outcomes should leverage a two-pronged approach, taking into account the goals of the business and the employee.
In terms of corporate aims, we consider the purpose of the training, why the need arose, and what would be a satisfactory outcome.
From an individual perspective, what skills do employees need to complete the specific tasks associated with their day-to-day role? And what skills do they need to hit the objective? How considerable is the required jump in ability?
2. Evaluate Current Skill Level
It’s true that evaluation is the “Holy Grail” of L&D, and it can also benefit your TNA.
Observations, knowledge assessments and individual interviews are great for defining current skill levels.
Leveraging these tools, we can identify areas where tasks are completed successfully and those that could be improved through additional training. This is also where we start to identify knowledge gaps throughout the business.
3. Highlight Knowledge Gaps
Using the data collected through the previous evaluations, we can map where performance gaps have happened and how long it could take to bridge them.
For example, data analysis is one huge skill gap in the UK at the moment. Research from the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) suggests that 48% of businesses surveyed were recruiting for data roles.
That same survey also found that one in seven businesses doesn’t feel they have sufficient data skills to meet demand. TNA could provide useful gap-bridging opportunities here.
Gaps often occur as a reaction to external pressures -such as legislative alterations – and internal shifts. To that end, businesses can usually find themselves reviewing four core areas of analysis:
- Legislative requirements: What are the legal requirements for organisations in the industry? Are these likely to change due to new legislation moving through parliament at home or abroad?
- Business-critical needs: What does the organisation need to continue delivering promises to customers and staff in the future?
- Operational needs: What capabilities are required to perform standard jobs in specific departments?
- Worker needs: What capabilities must individuals possess to complete their role effectively? Additionally, what new skills would be required to improve performance or hit target standards?
All businesses would love to be proactive and upskill workers before any prospective industrial or legislative changes to working methods. However, in reality, we rarely get that opportunity. That’s where reacting quickly to implement TNA can be a huge benefit.
Once we have established when, where, and how knowledge gaps occurred, we can begin prioritising specific training for certain target areas.
4. Training Needs Analysis
Your TNA should define business goals and skill levels and highlight who could benefit most from training.
Once we have this knowledge, we can begin creating a tailored training plan focused on driving improvements in specific business areas on a priority basis.
The analysis and subsequent training plan are designed to align employee skill levels with business goals. Customising training like this also allows you to cater to the specific needs of the business and individuals being trained.
But there is slightly more to it than that. So, let’s break the process down further and look at the specific steps included in an example training needs analysis.
What is the Typical Training Needs Analysis Process?
Typically, there are five core steps to most training needs analysis:
Our robust approach to training needs analysis comprises five core steps:
Step 1 – Define Your Goals
Generally speaking, TNA is usually instigated by organisational change, industrial landscape flux or pain point identification.
A great way to start defining your targets is to set SMART goals and intertwine them with business targets. But when we talk about business goals in relation to training, what do we mean?
Business targets can be directly tangible, hard metrics like:
- Profit
- Earning growth
- Share price
- Financial performance
- Improvement in new sales
- Increasing new subscriber numbers
- More positive customer reviews
However, there is also a litany of softer, less tangible goals, such as customer satisfaction or loyalty, enhanced accountability, improved training ROI, and enhanced company culture. Though these goals may be less measurable, they are incredibly important to business performance.
However, having large, overarching goals attached to training can be daunting. So, a better approach is to break those large goals down into departmental or even individual-based targets.
Alternatively, you could focus on enhancing the level of core competencies across the business. Core competencies are skills or knowledge that every business or department employee should have.
Step 2 – Assess Current Skills
At this stage, we want to define what competencies already exist in the team and where that level is in relation to the target standard.
Training needs to be broken down into individual behaviours to attain that goal level of competence.
For example, if the overarching goal is to take steps to improve customer satisfaction, training could be broken down to focus on these core behaviours:
- Relationship building: Developing skills as a person that customers can trust through calm communication and subject knowledge.
- Effective communication: Enhancing conflict resolution skills to effectively de-escalate conversations with unhappy customers, resulting in a lower likelihood of damaging reviews.
- Listening skills: Highlighting the importance of listening and understanding customer pain points to deliver a sensible and agreeable solution. Customer satisfaction scores can be up to 50% higher for companies that listen to their customers.
- Empathy: Training staff to show empathy with consumers is connected to enhancing listening skills. Customers want to know that your business only acts with their best interests at heart.
Methods like focus groups, skill assessments, and observations are great for determining your team’s competency levels before beginning any training analysis.
Of course, there are other behaviours associated with customer service. But by observing teams completing daily tasks like speaking with customers on the phone, you can then start to build a task list to highlight priority behaviours based on their importance.
That could look something like this:
| Task | Frequency | Importance | Difficulty |
| Answering customer calls | 80/day | High | Medium |
| Managing complaints | 10/day | High | Very High |
| Escalating complex issues to supervisors | 10/day | High | Medium |
| Handling billing and payment issues | 20/day | High | High |
| Processing customer orders | 40/day | High | High |
| Participating in team meetings | 1/day | Medium | Low |
| Updating customer records | 30/day | Medium | Medium |
Step 3 – Identify the Gaps
According to research by Oxford College, an estimated 20% of the workforce will be significantly underskilled for their jobs by 2030. This statistic highlights the importance of investing in existing team members and helping them upskill.
Based on the table above, we can start to see what tasks are a priority. You can now go deeper and analyse each task to define the specific skills and knowledge requirements attached to each behaviour, starting with the most pressing tasks.
In this instance, that’s “Managing complaints”. A robust breakdown of each would look like this:
| Behaviours attached to “Managing complaints” | Required skills | Required knowledge |
| Actively listening | Active listening, patience | Customer service principles |
| Gathering relevant information | Questioning, attention to detail | Common customer complaints, info-gathering techniques |
| Empathy and effective apologising | Emotional intelligence, communication, sincerity | Company’s apology policy, customer service etiquette, best practices |
| Identifying causality | Analytical thinking, problem-solving | Root cause analysis |
| Solution provision | Solution-orientated thinking, negotiation | Solution availability, company resolution policies |
| Explaining next steps | Clear communication, instructional skills | Company’s complaint resolution process |
| Customer follow-ups | Organisation, communication | Follow-up procedures, satisfaction processes |
| Complaint documentation | Accuracy, organisation | Note-taking, complaint recording system |
| Escalation | Good judgement, communication | Escalation protocols |
| Maintaining professionalism | Stress management | Stakeholder engagement, customer interaction guidelines |
| Learning from feedback | Receptiveness, continuous improvement |
Feedback mechanisms, service improvement strategies |
Knowledge passed out in our Train the Trainer course highlights the importance of assessing who in the team is demonstrating the most or the least of these behaviours.
If individual development interventions are required, you can start with those displaying the largest skills gaps.
Step 4 – Gather Feedback
Before implementing tailored training plans, ask your staff where they feel improvements could be made.
As we alluded to earlier when referencing Millennials and Gen Z workers, employees are increasingly valuing training opportunities. Additionally, giving team members more autonomy over their development is a great way to enhance company culture.
In fact, research from Ciphr found that Google searches for terms like “first aid training” and “time management training” improved by 21% and 12%, respectively, from July 2021 to June 2022.
Step 5 – Measure vs. Competition
Now that you know what training is needed in your business, think about looking at the wider industry.
How do your goals and current skill levels stack up? Are there any emerging trends you could highlight to stay competitive?
Before you know it, you’ll have an industry-leading training set up.
Common Challenges of a Training Needs Analysis
Conducting training needs analysis might seem like a perfect solution to improving the standards in your business. However, there are also some challenges to be aware of.
One of the biggest challenges is ensuring that the data you collect from the various analysis methods is reliable. For example, in an interview or survey, employees may embellish their competency levels to avoid any adverse reactions.
However, this is where task observation can help back up findings from the interviews and surveys.
However, valid insights aren’t the only issue attached to this method of professional development. Some other challenges are:
- Time: Often, analysis of training needs can be overlooked in a rush to implement training. However, this results in overly generic training, which does not result in improvements.
- Information: Ensure the information you use to educate your analysis is correct and current. You cannot base analysis or create effective training plans on outdated numbers and metrics.
- Management buy-in: Getting all levels of employees involved in the training will encourage more staff to engage. If workers can see that personal development is important to managers and execs, it will be important to them too.
- Generic approaches: Training need analysis works most effectively when used to create tailored development opportunities matched to specific skills and business goals.
Additionally, one key challenge facing most businesses aiming to up-weight their skill levels is the calibre of training. That’s why having your SMEs complete the Train the Trainer course with TSW Trainin is super important.
This provides the insights they need to resonate with their teams and ensures the quality of your in-house training.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Here are some frequently asked questions about training needs analysis.
How Can Technology Be Leveraged to Enhance the Process of a Training Needs Analysis?
You can leverage technology to educate your training needs analysis through several methods, including:
- Online surveys and quizzes
- Learning analytics to interpret patterns in performance
- Data mining to measure training efficacy
- Online courses with TSW Training and learning platforms
- Collaborative tools like Zoom, Slack or Microsoft Teams
- Internal social platforms
- Video technology to record observations
How Does a Training Needs Analysis Contribute to Organizational Performance?
By highlighting the skill gaps in your organisation, you take control of the working standards and enhance overall performance.
Additionally, when you include a stage of competitor research in your needs analysis, you also gain insights into how you compare against others in your industry.
But there’s more to improving your training than just industry standards. Other contributions include:
- Productivity Improvements
- Customer satisfaction
- Innovation
- Employee engagement and motivation
- Attracting the best talent
- Creating career paths for employees
- Increased revenue
- Improved company culture
Improving your internal standards, measuring performance against industry competitors, and enlisting the help of professional development experts like TSW are great approaches to developing an industry-leading training programme.
What is Training Development Needs Analysis?
A training development needs analysis is a process designed to help employees bridge any gaps in their knowledge. The overarching aim of the process is to achieve business and personal goals through skill development.
Conclusion
If you want to attain your business goals and holistically create an industry-leading brand, then training needs analysis is the core element to improvement.
Empowering your team with opportunities to close skills gaps gives them autonomy over their professional development, which is imperative for retaining your business’s talent and knowledge.
The first step to road mapping effective training needs analysis is to ensure your SMEs are up to standard.
A Train the Trainer qualification with TSW Training guarantees that level of training in your business.
