Assessing Your Training Needs
Creating a plan will help match your training budget to your company goals.

By Jami Henry

The training industry as a whole derives much of its success from direct mail. Every year, millions of pounds of mailers, magazines and postcards welcome entrepreneurs to the latest and greatest training event. Broad topics fill seats in large auditoriums and sell thousands of “back of the room” books.

All is not lost on these ample opportunities. Most attendees come away having learned at least one new thing or having found great resource materials. However, if you don’t assess your training needs first, these showcase events are simply a “dart at the target” approach to training, and rarely deliver the real value for your dollars.

Small companies can learn a few things from larger corporations when it comes to education and training. Big companies have figured out some great secrets over the years, and although not all corporate strategies fit the entrepreneurial concern, you can gain some nuggets of information.

Nugget One
A strategic plan helps you discover your training needs. Although some small companies avoid strategic planning like the plague, not all strategic planning is painful. What’s really called for is the identification of “core competencies” for your organization. Business leaders have discovered through experience that aligning the skills and knowledge of human capital with the goals of the business builds customer-centric organizations and creates cash flow.

A core competency is a set of knowledge and skills that create a sustained competitive advantage for your company. They are your most invisible assets and show up in the form of individuals and teams. Commonly used core competencies include strategic thinking, problem solving, relationship management, team building, decision-making, customer focus, innovation, creativity and communication.

Factors that might make up a competency definition include personality, knowledge, ability, motivation and interest. Aligning these competencies to the mission/vision/values of the organization is critical as well.

Once your goals are set, it’s time to begin identifying and defining the core competencies that best support those goals. Then a training plan can identify needs and solutions to help build on these core competencies. You’ll then have a better idea of where you need to spend your training dollars.  

Nugget Two
Understand where you are today. As with anything, choosing the best tool for the job generates the greatest outcome. Assessment tools are designed to provide specific measurements.  To illustrate the point, let’s say you have a manager who supervises five employees. Her ability to manage the team well directly affects several of the core competencies of the organization. But what does this manager actually know about leadership and good management skills?

If you attempt to assess her knowledge with a perception-based tool, the outcome will be an opinion from the manager about her own management skills, rather than the identification of actual knowledge. On the other hand, using a knowledge-based assessment tool will more closely identify what the manager actually “knows” about leadership skills. The outcome can give you specific information about the true knowledge level of the manager and can identify specific areas of development need.

This is not to say that perception, skill, personality and other assessment tools don’t have value. Of course they do. Just make sure to align the
information you need with the appropriate tool. In doing so, you will identify gaps of information needed to determine what training will most directly influence and support the strategic goals of the organization.

Nugget Three
Map it out. Once the strategic plan is in place, the core competencies are defined and the gap analysis is complete, it is time to design the map. In the long run, businesses that actually create a plan around business decisions see greater success and results. And yes, training is a business decision. Goals don’t achieve themselves, and employees who are not properly armed will not get you there.

This map does not have to be complicated. In fact, simple is often better. Writing it down is a powerful fuel to assist in the negotiation of the long road ahead. With the rising cost of gas prices, it is doubtful you get in the car and drive without having at least identified a possible destination. The same is true with assessing training needs.

It may help to expand your view of training to be more inclusive of developing the organization and the people in it. This perspective allows less travel to achieve greater outcomes, ultimately saving hard-earned dollars.

Nugget Four
If it comes to hope, cut the rope. Simply hoping that any training is better than no training will not make it so. The idea behind assessing your training needs digs at and uproots the core of the organization. Without up-front planning and analysis, you can only guess what training might fix this or that. As an entrepreneur, you can either throw the darts of hope, or you can cut the rope of guesswork and begin the process of planning.
Set your budget and your assessment eye on “organization development,” not just training, and watch your return on investment rise.

Jami Henry is the vice president and COO of Bellewether, a management consulting company providing organization development, assessment, project management and process design. She can be reached at (816) 554-9400.