Designing an effective, results-driven training program can be a long and expensive process. Too often business managers are in a hurry, wanting the new training program to be delivered yesterday. This puts a lot of pressure on the Training Department and the Instructional Training Designers to design and deliver the program as quickly as possible. 
When we’re under this type of time-pressure, it’s very tempting to gloss over some parts of the training design process. Unfortunately the big loser in many of these situations is often the Training Needs Analysis (TNA), which is often rushed or even overlooked completely.
While it’s true that rushing a TNA does give you more time to design great learning experiences and get the program out more quickly, there are several potential risks to not doing a thorough TNA.
The Training Needs Analysis is arguably one of the most important parts of the Instructional Design or Training Design process. It has a direct bearing on the learning experience that participants will receive through the course and the effectiveness of the training.
If it’s not performed and managed thoroughly you risk creating a program that doesn’t meet the needs of the business. This might be because the training doesn’t address the correct issue or learning gap, or because training wasn’t actually the best solution to the current business problem. Either way the cost of overlooking the TNA is definitely not worth it.
Because it is so crucial to the Instructional Design process, there are very few situations where rushing or glossing over a TNA is recommended. There are, however, a few ways to be more efficient with your TNA processes so that you can design effective training within limited time-frames.
Here are a few tips to running an efficient and effective TNA:
- Plan your TNA thoroughly up front. Remember the 80/20 rule. 80% of the time is “planning” while 20% is “doing”. The better planned you are, the more efficient your TNA will be. Before you even start to collect any data clarify the following:
- Who are the stakeholders?
- Who will be making the decision?
- What budget do you have to perform the TNA? Who is in control of the budget?
- Who are the employees/teams and managers that will be involved in and affected by the TNA?
- Who are the true subject matter experts?
- Organise a planning meeting with key stakeholders to discuss TNA expectations, budgets, deadlines, and roles and responsibilities.
- Asking stakeholders the right questions is crucial. Put together as many of your questions prior to the meeting as possible. Make sure you ask very specific clarifying questions during the meeting. Some key questions to ask the stakeholders include:
- What do people need to do that they currently cannot do?
- Where do they fall short or miss the mark?
- What do the stakeholders believe is preventing their people from doing the task well?
- If they were successful in the task/skill what would this look like?
- What would they be doing?
- How would they be behaving?
- Why has this issue become a problem now?
- What, if anything, could get in the way of the people being successful at the task/skill?
- Choose the most appropriate data collection methods that provide the best data about the performance gap. For example, if you’re analysing a drop in sales amongst a sales team you might choose to use a mixture of interviewing, sales report analysis and performance observations.
- Choose a range of different methods so you have a good balance of data. This will ensure you report on accurate data and establish the best recommendations.
A well executed Training Needs Analysis really is the foundation for a successful learning solution. To design effective and relevant training make sure you do as thorough a TNA as possible. Without it your final training program may not actually bridge the learning gap or create the desired business results.
