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TNA – Whose Needs Are You Analysing?

 

Many organisations start thinking about their training budgets for next year around about now, and to make sure they make a worthwhile plan, the logical next step is a Training Needs Analysis.  It’s logical, but if it’s the same one as last year, it’s probably not going to work.

The biggest difficulty we encounter with Training Needs Analyses is that they’ve been developed to find needs for training that is easy to specify.  What organisations need is an analysis of learning need.  To get to that they need to know not what jobs people are doing now but what challenges the organisation is facing and what skills, knowledge, structures and resources their people to maximise the opportunities available.

Before you start on a TNA think about whether the outcomes will help your organisation to do what it’s doing now well, or whether they’ll help define and create a move forward.

A good Learning Needs Analysis needs to be based upon the strategic imperatives of the organisation, rather than its historic need.  It is therefore vital that key stakeholders in the business, particularly at the executive level are engaged in the process at the earliest stage, shaping those imperatives against which the behaviours your organisation needs can be developed.

This gives a clear basis on which to analyse the future needs of the organisation against what currently exists.  An effective way to achieve this is through 360º feedback as you can get a real view of what behaviours really exist in the organisation, rather than those which people espouse or managers report based on halo and horn effects.

Analysing that feedback will generate an interesting set of learning needs, some of which can be met by training, some through active workshops, some through mentoring, some through projects and secondments, others through coaching and some via recruitment.

A full learning needs analysis of this type isn’t a project that can be carried out by a junior training officer in order to get it out of the way, but it is one that will really enable learning in the organisation, gain commitment from senior management and make an impact on the bottom line.

To learn more about how your organisation can get more out of it’s learning take a look at Structured Training’s enablers, or contact

Lynn Joy
tel: +44 (0)1789 734300
email: lynnj@structuredtraining.com