It is all too easy for training needs analysis to be ineffectual, but by following a clear process that focuses on the needs of the organisation as well as the individual, it can deliver valuable results. Pam Henderson explains.
Effective human resources policies and practices are vital for encouraging staff to go the extra mile, but it is equally important that staff are properly equipped for the journey. The idea of a training needs analysis (TNA) is to identify the new skills, knowledge and attitudes that people need to achieve their own and their organisations goals. This process results in a plan which might include a whole range of activities such as observation, coaching, job shadowing and in-house training not just attending outside training courses (and some people now call a TNA an LNA, a learning needs analysis, to stress this point). But despite its apparent benefits, the idea of a training needs analysis is one that makes many managers roll their eyes, yawn, or switch off. And rightly so it is easy to put together a TNA for your organisation that is utterly ineffectual, and that is perhaps why, in many arts organisations, when the going gets tough the already small training budget is amongst the first to face extinction.
The pitfalls
A departmental manager at a regional theatre was tasked with putting together a TNA for his organisation. He spent four weeks interviewing staff to identify competency gaps, getting catering, box office and front of house staff to complete various skills matrices. Using this information, he wrote a training plan for all 24 staff and set up a series of training days, the staff feedback on which was excellent. However, six months on the Chief Executive called the departmental manager in for a meeting, and asked him to explain why attendance was falling and catering sales had remained at a standstill.
So what went wrong? There were two fundamental problems. Firstly, the goals of the training plans did not reflect the goals of the organisation. This is a fundamental error that renders much TNA work redundant. It sounds blindingly obvious (but experience suggests that it is not) but it is vital that the business needs of the organisation drive the TNA and resulting learning interventions. If this link is established, then the learning becomes focused on the real issues confronting the organisation, and is therefore immediately relevant. The CEO and the departmental manager needed to clarify the core goals of the organisation (What would success look like for us?) and ensure that the TNA was about assessing the skills, expertise and attitudes that the organisation might need to achieve those goals.
Secondly, the values being communicated through the training were not those of the organisation in practice. Much of the training was about improving the performance of staff through empowerment, but the theatres culture was much closer to command-and-control: there were more than six layers of hierarchy in an organisation of 24 permanent staff. Again, this is a common problem with training; it is difficult for delegates to transfer their learning to their organisation because of the lack of opportunity or barriers to using their newly acquired skills.
The template
Paul Donovan and John Townsend1 in their no-nonsense management pocketbook provide a useful mnemonic to work through when planning a TNA, namely, INVESTIGATE.
- Identify key priorities: ensure that you have a clear understanding of what the organisation is seeking to achieve; this involves dialogue with key decision makers within your organisation.
- New performance goals: talk to managers and staff lower down the organisation, enabling you to get your head around the specific jobs that need doing, and the skills required to do them well.
- Visualise what will help and hinder: identify the positives that you might have to work with, and the negatives that are going to make your work more challenging.
- Eliminate the obstacles: some negatives can be got rid of reasonably easily by, for example, introducing online ticket sales (with the theatre above, this might have been a factor behind falling attendance figures, with customers unable to book tickets when they wanted). Other obstacles, such as the culture of the theatre in the case study, are going to be more difficult to eliminate, so perhaps your work here is explaining to decision-makers that the impact of a TNA is going to be limited because of how the organisation functions in practice.
- Search for alternative solutions: formal training courses really need to be a last resort, rather than a first call. For example, if a target is about improving staff retention, then looking at how the organises engages hearts and minds would be more productive than adopting the tom-cat training approach (the indiscriminate spraying of training all over, in the hope of getting results).
- Training solutions: there will be some performance issues for which a learning intervention of some kind is the answer, and it makes sense to share your thinking about this with the managers and staff involved. Training is used to fit the mnemonic hold on to the earlier point that, in the context of TNAs, training is a catch-all phrase to include all learning interventions.
- Indicators of success: describe the impact of your interventions in quantifiable, observable terms, making your subsequent evaluation more straightforward.
- Gaps in peoples competence: this is where the departmental manager in the case study started; but you do need to work through the previous steps to make sure that what you are doing is driven by your organisations goals, and not taking place in a vacuum.
- Assure relevance of content: you will already have had a dialogue with line managers about the broad scope of your interventions at the training solutions stage. Go back to them now and make sure that what you are planning is going to give those managers the performance they want.
- Transfer of learning: spend time thinking about how the learning is going to be transferred to the job itself research in the USA in the early 1990s suggested that the impact of up to 90% of training is lost. Resources available on www.peterhoney.com provide ample information on how people learn and how to use personal development plans to make learning stick.
- Evaluation of learning: evaluation aims to demonstrate some change or impact as a result of your interventions. If your TNA has been triggered by a keen appreciation of your organisations priorities and objectives, then it should be relatively straightforward to assess the impact of your interventions.
Pam Henderson is a director of the Henderson Aplin Partnership. She works with cultural organisations to help them further improve the effectiveness of their people.
t: 01223 520293; e: pam@hapartnership.com
1 Donovan, P. and Townsend, J. (2004) The Training Needs Analysis Pocketbook, Management Pocketbooks. See also Bee, F. and Bee, R. (2003) Learning Needs Analysis and Evaluation, CIPD