Hi everyone

I am starting to do a needs assessment on an initiative that may require training. Do any of you know of an article, white paper, Website, or template that may guide me through the process?

Many thanks in advance for your suggestions.

BK,

Here are a few words(OK..more than a few)about how-to use 360 feedback to assess training needs. More 360 FAQ's at www.360fyi.com.
Good luck...Jeff
.....................................
One of the critical functions of training and development professionals, especially instructional designers, is to determine what training an organization needs. The information obtained from organizational analysis (strategy, goals, climate, interrelationships, work processes and systems), task analysis (knowledge, skills and abilities required in a job), and person analysis (knowledge, skills and abilities people currently have), is collectively known as "front-end" analysis or needs assessment. It takes a lot of data to find out what instruction is needed. Today's 360 tools can make data collection and analysis quicker, more accurate and more reliable. The goal is to focus training resources on correcting low levels of performance.

Best practices typically follow this process:

1. Begin with 360-degree feedback. Use interviews with key managers to identify core competencies. Focus on where the organization is headed and the competencies needed by people to help the organization get there. Give a draft list of behaviors to selected managers to identify the key competencies, which will serve as a base list for review by the full management team.

2. Once competencies are identified, enter them into a customizable 360-degree feedback platform to create a survey with a scale to measure the degree of importance of each of the competencies. Be sure to include at least four or five competencies that are crucial to performing a job successfully.

3. Create and distribute the survey to the management team. Their responses will identify the most important of these competencies.

4. Use the refined competency lists to create new surveys to assess current skill levels of individuals within the organization.

5. Collect and aggregate the survey data from the individual assessments.

6. Compare trends. You may notice that only a small group of individuals need help on a particular competency, or you may notice that most of the target audience needs to improve a particular competency.

7. Recommend training initiatives to improve skill levels of the appropriate target audiences. For example, if you focus on supervisors, when you combine individual scores, you might see low scores in the category "Resolving Conflict," a critical category. Depending on the number of supervisors with low scores in this category (and other trends), you might recommend a seminar on conflict resolution.

Hi BK:

I suggest Training Needs Assessment by Allison Rossett or A Practical Guide to Needs Assessment by Kavita Gupta (ASTD). The book by Gupta comes with a disk full of forms and templates.

Good luck!

Cj

Cj:

Many thanks. I appreciate your suggestion.

BK

Entropy:

Thank you very much for you thorough response. I really appreciate it!

BK