What are your organization’s needs in terms of training? Have you ever considered preparing a training needs assessment? According to the University of Minnesota’s Department for Human Resource Management, there are three ways to conduct a training needs assessment: organizational assessment, occupational (task) assessment, and individual assessment:

Organizational assessment: In this type of assessment, we can determine the skills, knowledge, and abilities a company needs to meet its strategic objectives. This type of assessment considers things such as changing demographics and technological trends. Overall, this type of assessment looks at how the organization as a whole can handle its weaknesses while promoting strengths.

Occupational (task) assessment: This type of assessment looks at the unique tasks, skills, knowledge, and abilities required to do specific jobs within the organization.

Individual assessment: An individual assessment looks at the performance of an individual employee and determines what training should be accomplished for individuals.

Once you complete your preferred style of training needs assessment, you are ready to take the three steps to build a purposeful training curriculum:

1.    Review Your Existing Training Plan: If you already have an existing corporate online training program, you should investigate how your training strategy plan was designed, implemented and run, and whether its goals were met.

Ask your instructors and your learners to evaluate its success (or lack thereof) from any aspect to help you improve upon it for your new online training strategy (e.g. course quality, user engagement, instructor performance, LMS suitability, skills enhancement, etc.).

2.    Implement New Training Initiatives: The implementation phase is where the training program comes to life. Organizations need to decide whether training will be delivered in-house or externally coordinated. To measure whether the system is working and the firm is realizing maximum organizational results and business impact, we recommend implementing predictive evaluation (PE).

Here, training and development professionals — and the management team — predict results before training delivery. PE evaluates intention, adoption and impact against the forecast and implements corrective actions as needed when results fall below success gates. PE moves the measurement of training and development from a set of activity-based measures to value-driven continuous improvement efforts to ensure training investments create their predicted value.

3.    Create a Training Action Plan: The final step is to create a comprehensive action plan, including learning theories, instructional design, content, materials and any other training elements. Resources and training delivery methods should also be detailed. While developing the program, the level of training and participants’ learning styles need to also be considered. Many companies pilot their initiatives and gather feedback to make adjustments before launching the program company-wide.

Ready to incorporate the Ascendis Leadership Academy LMS into your training curriculum? Create your login account to begin the process!