How to Assess What Training Your Employees Need

This training needs assessment works best in small to mid-sized organizations. It will give you a quick assessment of the training needs of an employee group. It helps find common training needs for a group of employees.

Difficulty: Average Time Required: Approximately 1-2 hours

Here's How:

1. Gather all employees who have the same job in a conference room with a white board or flip charts and markers.
2. Before the meeting ask each employee to write down their ten most important training needs. Write specifics, like disciplining an employee when late or communication with other management.
3. Then during the meeting, ask each person to list their ten training needs. As they list the training needs, you capture the needs on the white board or flip chart. Make a tick mark when there is a duplicate need, some may seem a little different, but may be the same underneath the surface.
4. When all training needs have been listed, use a weighted voting process to prioritize the training needs across the group. In a weighted voting process, you use sticky dots or numbers written in magic marker to vote on and prioritize the list of training needs. Assign a large dot 25 points and smaller dots five points each. Distribute as many dots as you like. Tell needs assessment participants to place their dots on the chart to vote on their priorities.
5. List the training needs in order of importance, with the number of points assigned as votes determining priority, as determined by the sticky dot voting process. Make sure you have notes (best taken by someone on their laptop while the process is underway) or the flip chart pages to maintain a record of the training needs assessment session.
6. Take time, or schedule another session, to brainstorm the needed outcomes or goals from the first 3-5 training sessions identified in the needs assessment process. This will help as you seek and schedule training to meet the employees' needs.

Note the number one or two needs of each employee, that may not have become the priorities for the group. Try to build that training opportunity into the employee's performance development plan.

Tips: Training Needs Assessment can be, and often needs to be, much more complicated than this. But, this is a terrific process for a simple training needs assessment.
Make sure you keep the commitments generated by the training needs assessment process. Employees will expect to receive their key identified training needs met.

To discuss your employees needs call Innovative Leadership at 609-390-2830 or email us at info@innovativeleadershipdv.com

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