Training Needs Analysis

Training needs analysis: a definition

Training needs analysis (تحليل الاحتياجات التدريبية), abbreviated as TNA, is the identification of the gap between the performance that is required and the performance that is currently delivered, together with an examination of whether training is what will close that gap, carried out before any budget is spent on a course.

The definition joins two tasks. The first is to establish the gap, the distance between what the work requires and what is being done now. The second is to ask whether training is the remedy for that particular gap, because the existence of a gap does not by itself show that training will close it. Both tasks are completed before the spending, while the training budget has not yet been committed to a course. The analysis therefore comes first, and the course, where one is chosen, follows from what the analysis has found.

The three levels of training needs analysis

Training needs analysis is carried out at three levels, and each level asks a different question:

1. The organisation level. It asks which capabilities the coming plan needs that the organisation does not have today. At this level the analysis starts from the plan for the period ahead and sets it against the capabilities the organisation holds now. The need it identifies is a capability that the plan calls for and that the organisation currently lacks.
2. The job level. It asks which competencies the role actually requires. The question concerns the role as it is performed, not the person who holds it, and the answer is the set of competencies that doing the role in practice demands.
3. The individual level. It asks where the holder of the role stands against those competencies. The answer measures one person against the competencies that the job level has set out, and shows which of them the role holder already has and which are still missing.

Starting from the third level alone produces a training plan that serves individuals without being tied to what the organisation needs. A plan built in that way rests on where each role holder stands against competencies, and it makes no reference to the capabilities that the coming plan calls for. The training in such a plan can serve the individuals it is designed for, but the plan as a whole leaves unanswered the question that the organisation level asks.

The question training needs analysis asks before any training

Not every performance gap is a knowledge gap. So before any training is designed, training needs analysis examines the alternative explanations for the gap. The cause of the gap is established before training is chosen as the response to it, and three cases are distinguished:

• The employee does not know. Training is the appropriate response in this case. The gap lies in knowledge, and knowledge is what training provides.
• The employee knows but cannot act, for lack of a tool, an authority or time. In this case training changes nothing. The employee already has the knowledge, and what is missing is the tool, the authority or the time, none of which a course supplies.
• The employee knows, can act and does not. The cause then lies in incentives, in clarity or in management, not in skill. Training works on skill, so it does not reach a cause that sits in one of those three places.

This check is the point at which training needs analysis can save training budget in practice. Each gap that turns out to fall under the second or the third case is one on which a course would have changed nothing, and the check identifies it before the money is spent rather than after the course has been delivered.

Where training needs analysis draws its data

Training needs analysis draws on several sources that reinforce one another:

• Performance appraisal results. They record how each employee’s performance was assessed against what was expected of them.
• Observations from direct managers. They come from the managers to whom the employees report.
• Recurring customer complaints. They show a problem that reaches customers more than once.
• Quality and error indicators. They measure the quality of the work and the errors that occur in it.
• What employees themselves say. It gives the view of the people whose performance is being analysed.

Because the sources reinforce one another, a gap that appears in more than one of them is supported by more than one piece of evidence. Relying on a single source, and on the employee’s direct request in particular, produces a wish list rather than an analysis of need. A request records what an employee would like to attend. It does not establish, by itself, the gap between required and current performance with which the definition begins, and it does not show whether training is what would close that gap.

What training needs analysis produces

Training needs analysis produces priorities, not a list of courses. Those priorities answer four questions:

1. Which gap is addressed first. The gaps the analysis has identified are placed in an order, so that the first to be addressed is chosen rather than left to chance.
2. For whom. Each gap is assigned to the people in whom it was found.
3. By which method. The method is chosen from among practical training, job shadowing, mentoring or a course. Courses are one of these methods and not the only one, which is why the output of the analysis is a set of priorities and not a list of courses.
4. By which indicator the gap is known to have closed. Each gap is given an indicator that shows when it has been closed.

Without the last of these, the indicator, training becomes an activity that is reported by its number of hours rather than by its effect. Hours record how much training took place. They do not show whether the gap that the analysis identified has closed, and that is what the indicator is set to show. With the indicator in place, the result of the training is reported against the gap it was chosen to address.

This is an explanation of the concept, not legal advice.