Why Should You Conduct Training Needs Analysis Amongst Your Employees
Modern-day work culture is ever-evolving. With technological advancements, many things that are part of work environments undergo frequent changes. Organizations migrate from one technology to another. Tools that implement technologies change or get updated. New processes are established, and new workflows are designed. These changes render employees’ skillsets and knowledge base insufficient from time to time. Hence, it is difficult to find a hire that ticks all the boxes in terms of knowledge and skills. That’s why employee training has become essential for employers from the workforce capability point of view. The mere provision of training may not be enough. Ensuring that all the useful knowledge is delivered, and all the required skills are honed is necessary. Let us understand how getting inputs from employees about training needs can help.
Employees implement learnings of their training program on a daily basis. In case, the program or a part of it becomes outdated, those learners would detect it first. Communicating with employees about their training needs can help reduce the time you take to identify gaps between the learnings and required capabilities.
New work methodologies, technologies, or tools that become a part of the work environment may not be easy to comprehend for everyone. If such addition is vast, then it may not be feasible to develop training content for all of it. In such scenarios, asking the learners themselves about what they want to be trained about is an ideal way.
Employees may have demands about other factors of a training program than coverage. Way of delivering content is one of them. There are several aspects to the way of delivering. Some of those are the type of media, size of units of the syllabus, the tutors, and user interface. User may want a certain topic to be illustrated using graphical elements, rather than reading a text about it. It may be required that a lengthy topic is broken into multiple smaller unit. In case a tutor is delivering lectures, then some of the learners may find it difficult to keep up with his/her pace of covering the syllabus.
When training is delivered as e-learning, the user interface may turn out to be challenging to navigate through, for some users. Compatibility with the users’ devices can be a major concern. This problem is more likely to arise when the user base is large. All of the users may not have a device that is not old. Users may not be able to access the training program if they have an old device.
To summarize, conducting a training needs analysis among your employees can benefit your organization in multiple ways. It can help you understand what exactly your employees want to be covered in the training program. Consequently, that allows you to determine what shall be omitted from the training. Employees could struggle with a few aspects of the program, like the way of delivery or technical aspects of the system. Having feedback from them would help in those regards as well.
