Essence of Identitying Training Needs

Essence of Identitying Training Needs  

Learning starts the very day we come to life on earth. As infants, we first need to learn to breathe independently and from there we continue to learn a  huge variety of stuff, starting survival related, moving to relationships, education, professional and beyond. 

At a point we need to learn to accept that "I will become a picture one day''

When it comes to our professional front , training or learning about a progress or a change in our behaviour, in the desired direction for  each situation and place. 

It may be our school, college or office. This behavioural change is through 

application of learning principles and usually has a focus on knowledge or 

information. skills or activities and attitudes or beliefs. 

Training is task-based and it deals with a short time frame geared for the mastery of specific skills. It is the act of informing or giving instructions on a certain topic or task in a sequential pattern to the trainees, participants or employees in the best suited format. 

Education is broader based and has traditionally dealt with the ‘higher order’ knowledge or cognitive aspects of learning over a longer time horizon. 

Development under the traditional vision, falls in the middle between training and education. 

The impact of a training program ends with the learning of a skill but development as a process is continuous or ongoing. as it's life long learning.

The first step to training is identifying its needs which forms the core of an impactful learning activity.

Training could be for functional or non functional topics. 

Functional meaning related to various roles like marketing, sales, creative, production, operations and non functional ones are generic in nature likewise corporate life skills, communication, presentation and interpersonal skills amongst others

A training program has three perspectives - The Trainee, The Trainer and The Organisation.

The very first step to conduct a training session is to design a training module or a program and for this certain information is crucial on the basis of which the same decided and planned.

For instance, in the year 2019, a premium deodorant brand was not able to achieve the projected revenue from sales for about six months despite having their own sales personals stationed at various selling outlets where they had distributed their product for customer purchase mainly (Shopping malls like Westside / Shoppers Stop and Lifestyle). The first thing was that they needed to find out why the sale is not happening and where the difficulty is, with the product, price, promotion, the sales personals or something else. 

On digging deeper through various sources , the  management figured that customers would come in asking for a deodorant but would either not buy or at times end up buying it from the competition counter within the same premises. They then sent mock customers at the venues and figured that the customer experience in terms of purchase journey needed to be worked on.

When there is a mismatch between actual performance & expected performance where the actual is lower than expected, there is a need for some measures to be taken to fill the gap. One effective measure in this case is training the sales team. In a way training as a need identified at initial

Sales is a role with multiple skill facets broadly including product knowledge, understanding of the brand consumers, update on competition, sales and closing skills and customer experience during purchase journey. 

To find out what exactly the sales team needs to be trained on in this case, is the  identification of training needs.

Training need identification is a systematic approach undertaken  to understand the trainees or participants existing knowledge and skills and draw parallels with the ideal skills level with the purpose to match the gap between expected v/s actual performance.

Only if this is done accurately, it will be possible to design a relevant training program keeping in mind the actual purpose in mind. In this case it is product sales.

Training need identification is very crucial also because:

- It identifies knowledge gap

-  Puts training resources to optimum utility 

-  Keep up to the relevance of the training with its purpose 

-  Review current and past trainings 

-  Present results to higher management

To identify training need it is important to: 

- Figure overall performance

- Compare with competition 

- Understand business environment 

- Perform necessary assessments 

- Train for common pain points

A training need can be identified through different ways. Some of them are: 

- Manager feedback 

- Employee feedback 

- Surveys and Questionnaire

- Interviews

- Observations and Assessments

Training need identification is hence the foremost critical step to design a training module that  serves the purpose. Once the training needs are identified and the module is designed on the same basis, the selection of the best suited training method will step up accurately. 

In this case if the training need identified is the communication or presentational skills of the sales team, an experiential training approach will be apt, typically a role play format.

To summarise my blog, I would say that  identifying the training needs accurately is the factor deciding the training module plan and in turn the training method to put to application.

Would love to know your thoughts on this. 

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