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Assessing Employee Development Needs

Needs assessment is a process for identifying what knowledge, skills, and abilities are needed to move your organization forward. It is a method for pinpointing reasons for gaps in performance and/or a method for identifying new and future performance requirements. Too many organizations skip this critical step and jump right into creating development programs. Without the assessment step, costly and time consuming mistakes can occur when organizations make assumptions about what their employees need.

Making assumptions about training needs without doing a needs assessment can totally derail a comprehensive employee development plan. For example, let’s say you’ve finally been given a budget to do some employee development. You’ve been asking for it for years and finally made the case that employee development is an engagement and retention tool. You’re excited to get started, so you call someone you met the previous week at a networking event and ask them to come in and do some training for your employees. The class is scheduled and either no one shows up, or people come and the evaluations are terrible and you’re devastated!

What went wrong? Well, in your excitement to get started, you skipped the needs assessment phase. This is where you uncover what your workforce needs to enhance their skills. So, take the time to do it and the chances of having a successful employee development plan go up!

In Chapter 2, we discussed the importance of doing a workforce plan. If you’ve taken that step, you probably discovered that some of your employees don’t have all the skills or abilities needed to move your organization to the next level. You can use the information from the gap analysis to set the agenda for your employee development programs; if you haven’t already done the gap analysis, here are some other ways to conduct a needs assessment so that you can design a training and development program that will have maximum impact on your organization. Just a reminder: As with any data-gathering, be careful to calibrate expectations. If employees think that just because they suggest something to you, it will happen, you will have a lot of unhappy employees to deal with. Let them know you are talking with a lot of people and gathering as much data as possible before training plans are finalized, and that you sincerely appreciate their suggestions—no matter how far out they may be—but you can’t promise that everything they asked for will be part of the final plan.

Needs Assessment Methods

Performance appraisals. Analyze the development recommendations made by managers during the appraisal process to gather information about what training and development programs are needed at this time. Using this method presumes that the managers in your organization who completed the appraisals have been honest in what they have identified as development needs. If your managers have been trained in how to evaluate development needs, using information collected in performance meetings can be one of your best ways of determining what training and/or development is needed at this time in your organization’s lifecycle. If you find your managers themselves need training on how to determine what an employee needs to improve, you may have just discovered one of the first training sessions you need to have in your management training curriculum.

Employee or managerial interviews. For example, if your organization has a call center and you want to know what development needs exist, interview a percentage of the employees in the call center. Interviews are one of the easiest ways to collect the information you require. Sometimes, even a brief discussion with employees will point you in the right direction, and then you might want to have a more in-depth discussion with their supervisor or manager to confirm your assumptions. If you need to get more information, consider a formal interview process, conducting either in-person or phone interviews. Develop your questions in advance and summarize your interviews immediately after the event so that you don’t miss anything. Look for trends as you gather data. For example, if you hear from several employees that they’d really like to improve their business writing skills and you confirm that with their managers, you can be sure that the employees and the organization will benefit from a program on business writing.

Focus groups. This is another effective way to gather data. Bring together a group of people who share similar expertise, and ask their opinions and ideas about a specific topic. The size of the group should be no less than five or six people, and no more than 12. Focus group facilitation requires preparation and a trained facilitator. Facilitators need to remain objective and non-judgmental, and be able to encourage everyone to participate. In addition to the facilitator, have a note-taker so that the facilitator can focus his or her attention on asking the questions.

Surveys and questionnaires. Developing good surveys is not easy, but a well-crafted questionnaire can provide valuable data for you in order to determine your training and development requirements. Before you put a survey together, consider these questions:

    Will you be asking closed questions where responses can be easily tabulated or open-ended questions where participants record their own thoughts?

    How will the data be analyzed?

    Can you use an online survey provider, such as Survey Monkey?

Developing questions for interviews, focus groups, or surveys is critical to the needs assessment process. You want to ensure that your questions are easily understood and not misinterpreted, which might result in inaccurate data. Carefully review your questions and the order in which you ask them, and be sure not to ask questions that require two answers (for example, “Why do you do send the ABC summary on Tuesday and what is it used for?”). We strongly recommend that, if you are putting your own survey together, you do a test before sending it to the target audience.

Observation. Watching people actually doing work or listening in on phone calls can be an effective way to gather data, but be sure that the employees are notified ahead of time as to what you are doing and why. Otherwise, you may do more harm than good by creating anxiety and unrest.

Once you’ve completed the needs assessment, the next step is to come up methods to develop the skills and abilities of your employees.

    See Chapter 23 (Best Approaches to Developing Employees) for employee development options.

Discussion Questions

1.    How can you use data from performance appraisals to determine employee development needs?

2.    How can you use employee interviews to determine employee development needs?

3.    How can you use focus groups to determine employee development needs?

4.    How can you use surveys to determine employee development needs?

5.    How can you use observation to determine employee development needs?

6.    Name three to four things to keep in mind when preparing a survey or questionnaire.