You are the owner of a company or you are in charge of its operations, and you are concerned as to the performance of your employees. You see that they are doing their jobs just as you would expect them to, but you feel that they need a little more inspiration and drive in their work. So you set out and search for ways to train and motivate your employees so that they can perform at above-average to even superlative levels. You have this with the future success of your company in mind; of course, any well-meaning leader will always consider the welfare of his subordinates as well. For these reasons, the Training Needs Assessment (TNA) method is an indispensable and fundamental method of training and enhancing the skills and competencies of your workers.

Training Needs Assessment, for it to succeed, should form part of an important though challenging portion of the task that is normally allotted to training specialists and managers within the business or organization. It calls for a fully-conceptualized and –realized training framework that should be conducted at least once a year from the lowest (group, section, or department) to the highest (company-wide or organizational) levels. Indeed, TNA can be conducted occasionally but it does call for intensive preparation and documentation, making it far more challenging than what it appears to be.

For you to properly conduct a Training Needs Assessment process, you should follow these five basic steps:

1. Decide on the TNA’s proper context and plan accordingly. Its goals should depend on the area to which you should apply the TNA to. The TNA should also address the business framework of its target group within the company and it should then be made accessible to everyone, particularly to those at the higher echelons of the company. This framework should list down your company’s aims and intentions; it would be better if each group and section within your company has their own set goals and objectives which they will strive to work hard for.
2. Determine the Skill Sets, Psychological Attitudes, Areas of Expertise and Knowledge, and Skills that are needed to be addressed and enhanced. The important thing to realize here is that you are aiming to build upon the particular business section and not on the personal attributes of those who compose that section. This work should be assigned to those who lead that business section; at this stage, the training manager is there only to manage the proceedings.
3. Bring down the focus from the Business Group position to the responsibilities of those employees who make up that unit. Set out the particular roles and duties that can be filled out and accomplished by each and every employee that composes that business unit or group according to their skills sets, attitudes, mindsets, and knowledge.
4. Evaluate the present status of the skill sets, knowledge, attitudes, and behavioral attributes of your employees. Each of them should undergo a thorough assessment to determine what roles and capabilities they will be able to do well. When you find breaks in your employees’ capabilities and the roles in which they are supposed to play, specialized training should be done to help mediate those gaps.
5. Collect all the data that you have garnered from the fourth step. By this time, you should have decided on the type of training or instruction that your employees or units would need for them to properly accomplish the goals that is set for them. This completes the Training Needs Assessment process.

Keep in mind that the TNA method does not end at one occurrence alone. It should be a continuous process that builds up on the previous findings that were collected from the previous TNAs. This way, you can be assured of reaching your company’s set aims and constantly updating on them to suit your company’s changing needs.

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Upgrading Your Workforce

One of the main responsibilities of human resources departments is to create and maintain a better workplace. Upgrading the workforce entails a number of activities that should accommodate the ergonomic and physical needs of employees. It should also entail the creation of a more collegial work environment to enhance skills, creativity, well-being and general satisfaction levels among the employees.

While human resources strategy differ depending on the type of organization, work force size and the current business environment, efforts to upgrade the workforce should essentially focus on improving employee motivation, well-being and engagement of  majority of the employees in meeting the set organizational goals and aims.

What should be done?

Training Needs Assessment

Upgrading your workforce starts with identifying the performance needs, knowledge, abilities and skills of a group of employees. This process can prove may prove effective to small and mid-sized organizations. It is an important activity since it helps in the identification and allocation of adequate resources needed to achieve organizational mission, improve quality of products and services as well as the general productivity of the firm. Need assessment also helps to identify the existing gaps between current performance and the expected future performance thus helping the firm to position itself appropriately.

Levels of a Training Needs Assessment

Organizational assessment: This involves evaluating the level of organizational performance through identifying the technical skills or experience, knowledge and abilities required in the organization. This process entails understanding the internal and external environment and how it determines the market position of the firm. Organizational needs assessment creates a new understanding of the changes in the political, technological, demographic, social, cultural and economic aspects of the society.

Occupational assessment: This entails a critical examination of the existing occupational opportunities and gaps in relation to the skills, abilities, and knowledge of a certain group of employees. At this level, new mechanisms for eliminating such discrepancies are identified and implemented.

Individual assessment: This involves looking at the individual performance of each employee and analyzing some of the strong points and capacity to the present job status. This is important since it helps to identify training needs of your employees.

Work skill training

While workforce training is expensive, when such a process is well-designed and executed, it can positively impact on the competitive success of the organization. The training needs of each employee should be identified and assessed in terms of their importance to the organization. Encouraging strong interpersonal relationships among staff and management can help to foster the outcomes of training sessions. This is because, such activities offer an opportunity where employee opinions, skills and talents are recognized and valued by the rest of the team.

Executive training

One of the main purposes of executive training is to enhance promotion opportunities for the employees. Providing ongoing training and development opportunities within the organization can help the employees to do better. Executive training also helps the employees to collaborate through networking hence creating an environment of mutual trust, confidence, job satisfaction, innovation and a sense of job security.  

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There are several benefits to conducting a Training Needs Assessment in advance of embarking on a training program.

A customized Training Needs Assessment helps to identify, assess and compare what your organization is doing with the knowledge, skills and behaviors needed to enhance its performance.

Some of the remarkable benefits include:

• Development of High Performance workplaces through engagement & participation

• Part of succession plan to identify competence, capability and potential

• Determines key performance and business needs to be addressed that will achieve results

• The development of training strategies appropriate to the organizational structure, culture and geography of the enterprise in conjunction with effective change management activity to ensure the goals of the training are delivered and achieved

• Build credibility for the development process with all stakeholders

• Demonstrate the proof of alignment between the development and HR programs, strategic objectives and operational goal

• Expert assistance with a fresh approach for innovation

• During organizational or role change, training needs analysis plays a major role in identifying competency and behavioral requirements

• In evaluation of your own recent training projects there may be a requirement for a change in initiatives which requires a fresh analysis to measure the extent to which employees have enhanced and the organization has benefited

• Earn respect of senior management for implementing solutions that make a difference

• Identification of gaps and/or existing solutions not immediately evident.

• Identification and evaluation of current performance gaps between people, strategy, behavioral and processes

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Having the knowledge, in addition to the corresponding set of skills, will keep any employee prepared in situations where they have to perform to the best of their ability. This is why employees—and even executives—of any business or organization should participate in work skill training, allowing them to learn the skill they need to make their business more prosperous.

Work skill training has several variations, based on the group of people undergoing general business-related instruction. For example, many employees undergo customer service training to facilitate customer satisfaction on a corporate level. Customer service training instructs employees about skills, knowledge and abilities needed to increase their company’s overall customer satisfaction.

Customer service training has several benefits, including helping a business and/or organization retain customers, increase their profits and better handle larger volumes of customers using a smaller workforce, once they’ve started training employees. With customer service training, employees can potentially learn techniques to better serve them in the workplace.

Executives also get training to learn how to better handle their positions at the top of any their business or organization. Executive training often comes in the form of executive education, programs or courses at graduate-level business schools, where executives, business leaders and function managers can learn more about their trade. 

Executive training is also taught as executive coaching; although more informal than school-based executive education, the process of executive coaching helps executives develop better leadership skills and facilitate their personal growth through coaching. The training aims to improve an executive’s performance in their workplace, eventually helping them realize their full potential as leaders of their companies.

To determine what a business and/or organization needs before employee and/or executive training can begin, a training needs assessment is generally required. Training needs assessments are mainly used to determine the performance requirements, like abilities, knowledge and skills, a business or organization-related workforce needs to prosper.

A training needs assessment mainly addresses the resources needed to fulfill the organization mission of a company, improve their workforce productivity and help them continue to provide quality products and/or services. The assessment recognizes both positive and negative conditions of a business, ensuring that both sides of their projected necessities will be addressed.

In relation to training needs assessments, training needs analysis depicts the formal process of identifying the training gap, usually determined through a training needs assessment. It’s used as a part of the system development process for a business or organization and serves the role as a bridge between available organization data, training media and its objectives. 

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Training Needs Assessment is often overlooked but important component of the training development process.  A Training Needs Assessment is the process by which we can determine what sort of knowledge and skills someone has that can be accomplished via some sort of learning means. It’s a way of figuring out what needs the worker has that can be met with training.

Training needs are essential because they are the first step in the training design – it’s the beginning of the design phase of training and development. But training may not always be the answer. Very often there are other non-training issues that are root causes for perceived problems.

Training Needs Assessment has to be done professionally. As an example, the employer might have engineered a new process or be rolling out a new product. As they are in the preparation phase, one area that will likely be identified is training. Someone will ask or mention, “Hey, what about the employees’ training needs?” Then the employer might start to put together a training program based on those needs. Traditionally, the employer might contact their local teaching institution and ask them to assist in this identification of training needs. However, in the current era, the employer would most likely looking for professionals who are more focused on Training Needs Assessment.

Training Needs Assessments are the entire basis for the training – without a Training Needs Assessment you have no idea if you’re even doing the right training, for the right reasons, and creating the right learning objectives. It’s a step that really cannot be skipped. It’s the very first step in creating the training – without it, there is no second step.

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What is On-the-Job Training? On-the-job training is a type of skill development where a person learns how to perform a specific skill-set through hands-on experience.

On-the-job training is the oldest form of training. Prior to the practice of off-site training classrooms, the only practical way of learning a job was working along side an experienced worker in a particular trade or profession—as demonstrated by the practice of apprenticeship during the Middle Ages when master craftsmen passed on skills and knowledge to novices who worked along side them.

On-the-job training focuses on the acquisition of skills within the work environment generally under normal working conditions. Through on-the-job training, workers acquire both general skills that they can transfer from one job to another and specific skills that are unique to a particular job. On-the-job training, typically includes verbal and written instruction, demonstration and observation, and hands-on practice and imitation.

In addition, the on-the-job training process involves one employee—usually a supervisor or an experienced employee—passing knowledge and skills on to a novice employee.

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One of the great advantages of knowing what employees’ strengths are is that organisations can align people with complementary strengths.

For example, if the organisation was attempting to please a potential customer and needed to know more about it, an employee with PR strengths could be assigned to the team involved in that exercise.

If the company wanted to get into a new market it might seek out staff with analytical strengths. Or if the executive team was aware that one member had a strategic strength, that person would be singled out to be involved in any strategic planning.

Another advantage of identifying staff strengths is that managers and staff can seek help from those they know have complementary skills. This is no longer admitting failure.

Recent research shows that:

• Employee performance is, on average, 36% higher when line managers focus their appraisals on staffs’ strengths and talents.
• Customer retention is 44% higher in companies where people are allowed to do what they do best‟ every day.
• Teams with line managers who take a strengths-based approach are 86% more effective than teams which don‟t.

SAInS works with organisations to assess employee strengths and competencies and align them with organisational goals.

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