How to Leverage Data for an Accurate Training Needs Analysis

Employee training is vital for any company endeavoring to keep up with the changes and demands of the modern business world. But, although there is an understandable urgency in getting staff trained and ready to go, analyzing exactly what your business needs in terms of its training programs is an important initial process that shouldn’t be missed.

The first step in setting up the training your organization’s needs, before you invest in creating engaging and impactful employee training sessions, should be to carry out an accurate training needs analysis or TNA. The best way to do this is to leverage data.

Based on accurate data, a TNA will help you build a solid foundation for designing company training programs to fill the skills and knowledge gaps in your workforce. It will give you the best chance of preparing your team effectively, to face the future, fully equipped and upskilled, by designing training to meet real and relevant needs.

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What is a training needs analysis?

Let’s look in more detail at what a TNA is, and how it can help your company. A TNA really involves taking a broad overview of your business: its goals, its vision, and its plans for expansion or development. 

Once you have done that, you should be looking for any gaps or vulnerabilities that could be addressed through staff training. It’s a comprehensive scrutiny of the skills, knowledge, and know-how of each staff member and department within the organization.

Based on the analysis, you might, for example, realize that improved marketing is needed to boost your brand profile. But further analysis might also reveal that your team is lacking knowledge around tools such as account-based marketing. This will flag up a need to develop training programs using ABM campaign examples and models, and other marketing innovations.

A key part of your TNA will also consist of looking at your current training and assessing how effective and successful it is. You will want to look at everything from the learning materials and technology used to teaching methods and scheduling. You will also need to look at any results in terms of tests or assessments as well as feedback from learners.

Using analysis is basically a way to give focus and direction to your training efforts, based on those areas most needed by your business and its employees.

What part can data play in accurate training needs analysis?

Data plays a vital part in an accurate TNA. Having numbers and stats on which to base your training decisions means that you are acting on facts, not opinions, and spending your training budget wisely.

Overspending on non-targeted or unnecessary training is one of the main pitfalls to avoid when building your training program. Training is expensive and time-consuming, but data can help you establish exactly what you need to provide for your workforce. But accurate data has other important advantages.

• Leveraging data gives you hard evidence of a need for particular training. This can be used to get finance from management.
• It helps you make decisions with confidence about the types of training to invest in.
• It enhances the training offering to employees, by enabling targeted training sessions. It also provides evidence to staff that the training is indeed useful and relevant for their careers.

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Choose the data sources and methods

Choosing the right data sources and methods is an important part of the process. If you were selecting an inbound call center platform to process business communication, you would probably do some research before choosing the most effective solution. 

It’s the same principle with choosing data sources to inform your training decisions. Choose the source that’s the most relevant to your business.

Sources

Here are some of the main sources of valuable data related to training in your organization.

• Organizational data. This in essence, is data derived from looking at your business’s  present goals, and the challenges or obstacles to achieving those goals.
• Job data is derived from looking at the knowledge, skills, and even approaches your workforce need to achieve the business aims.
• Learner data is information, probably obtained from feedback on previous training sessions, which will help you get a picture of the learning styles, challenges and needs of your workers.
• Stakeholder data is information about those who staff training might impact, albeit indirectly, such as clients and business partners or colleagues not involved directly in training.

Methods

Depending on your business needs and setup, here are some of the most common methods for obtaining data:

• Observing and assessing work carried out by staff.
• Interviewing staff and stakeholders.
• Giving staff and stakeholders questionnaires.
• Tests and exams.
• Focus groups and informal discussions.
• Performance appraisals and reviews
• Performance and sales analysis.
• Customer and client feedback.
• Competitor analysis.

It’s important to choose the methods for collecting data that are the most appropriate for your business. For example, you may have identified a gap in the skills of your sales staff, and you may be planning on training that improves your company’s lead generation process. 

In this case, it might be more valuable to focus on observing and assessing work carried out by staff, as well as looking at performance and sales analysis, rather than tests and exams.

Likewise, competitor analysis might be the most valuable source of data for convincing management that training is needed in a new area, to arm your business with the means to match your competitors’ output.

Analyze the data

There’s no question that learning analytics for training programs is incredibly valuable. It enables a business to tailor and target its training offering, and save time and money by avoiding investing in unnecessary programs.

But having gathered data via a suitable source for your business, the next step is to analyze the information gathered, and get those valuable insights.

What you are looking for are key indicators and insights that will help you focus on the most pressing training needs. You might do this by entering information into specialist software, or simply by reading through and noting down observations and emerging patterns. However you look at the data, ask yourself, which messages are consistently coming through?

You can divide the data into areas such as: individual staff needs, functional, or business wide issues. You can also categorize according to urgency and timescale related need, as well as levels of importance and likely cost.

Your TNA report

Finally, with the objective of having a clear image of your findings, and being able to show your discoveries to management and stakeholders, compiling a TNA report is vital.

The format you choose for your report will depend on your individual business. It could be a standardized business report, something more informal, or even a presentation. However, structure is generally a good idea, as it will be easier for colleagues to digest and process.

The first element to your report should be a clear evaluation and presentation of your current training provision. Include all types of training, and be clear about cost, time spent on sessions and scope. 

It’s important to set out the pros and cons of the current model, and provide evidence of its effectiveness. This will be the baseline upon which you can outline at the end of the report, your proposed improved training program.

Next, you need an executive summary of the objectives for the report, before outlining your methodology and sources. After that, you’ll cover your findings, and set out the collected data in a logical and easily accessible form.

Finally, your report will need a conclusion where you can sum up your findings and bullet point the main points. This will provide the basis for the last component of the report, which is the most important part; your recommended course of action. In other words, how you have distilled your findings into an actionable plan for training within your business.

Your recommendations should include as much detail as possible on the areas of training your business needs to invest in. You will need to make the case for the types of expertise your business needs to teach its employees, which departments and individuals are in most need, what this is likely to cost, and how much company time this will require. 

It’s also a good idea to identify the key benefits to the business of pursuing this course of action, and threats in not changing the training provision. 

Final thoughts

A training needs analysis powered by insightful data is a powerful and informative tool for making changes to your business’s training and development provision. Done correctly, this process can be transformative, in terms of filling knowledge gaps and upskilling your workforce.

A TNA can help your organization focus their staff’s valuable time, and the business’s valuable budget on the right training programs. It means that learning can truly add value and address genuine gaps in knowledge and expertise.

Knowledge is power, and gathering data to steer your business’s training ambitions is certainly a powerful example of this. Well trained and skilled staff are crucial to your business’s growth and success, getting that training right is the key advantage of conducting a TNA driven by data.