Conducting a Health and Safety Training Needs Analysis In 8 ‘You Can Do It’ Steps

You want to create impactful training programs that power employee performance. To do that, you need to conduct a training needs analysis based on historical data, first-hand experiences, and future goals. This is how we will manage your training matrices and invest in your people as though they were our own….

Here’s how:

1. Determine Your Goals

Your organisation’s goals are constantly growing and changing, as are the roles and responsibilities of your employees. Compare your current training programs and outcomes with your company’s short- and long-term goals to ensure they’re aligned.

Determine the specific goals you want to achieve through employee training. Consider:

The outcomes and improvements you’re expecting.
How you will measure progress, success, or failure.
If you’ll need more than training to achieve the goal.

You should also establish the level of expertise you expect the learner to achieve from the training:

Awareness: They gain a basic knowledge of a topic.
Application: They learn how to complete a specific task.

Mastery: They learn how to complete a task (or become knowledgeable on a topic) to the degree that they can teach it to someone else afterward.

2. Run A Cost Analysis

Part of your planning should include calculating the costs and return on investment you expect from creating, conducting, and analysing the training programs.

Typical costs include training time, training content development (we can do all this for you), training evaluation time, content delivery, lost productivity, and travel and administrative expenses, if applicable.

3. Select Candidates

Next, determine which colleagues or departments need a training analysis. Survey employees to gain insights into their skill levels and training desires, request feedback from managers and leaders, and gather reviews from managers, peers, and customers to determine skill gaps and knowledge deficiencies.

Review your findings to identify the employees or departments that would benefit most from improved training at this time.

4. Identify Necessary Skills

Once you’ve chosen your candidate(s), review their role and identify the skills required for an employee to perform the job successfully.

If you’ve already conducted job analyses at your company, refer to the documentation as it should outline, in detail, the necessary skills, tasks, responsibilities, and qualifications for the role.

5. Assess Skill Levels

Next, measure the employee’s current knowledge and skill level through assessments, quizzes, and testing.

Compare the results against the required skills for the job. With this information—along with your surveys, assessments, and reviews—you’ll see what skill gaps and knowledge deficiencies are hindering the role or department. Then, you can start planning a training program that addresses it.

6. Find The Experts

Locate subject matter experts within your company who know the ins and outs of the training topic and recruit them as needed to plan out your training program. They’ll be able to give you the most recent and useful information, which you can use to design your program and make it as beneficial to the learner as possible.

7. Design And Deliver Your Training

Now, it’s time to build the training program that bridges your colleagues skill gaps and powers their performance. Your training approach should be tailored to your colleagues preferred learning style, their goals, the business’s goals, and your established training methods.

Your training could include coaching or mentoring; online learning with experiential components, micro-learning modules, and games; on-the-job learning; books and reading materials; or conferences.

8. The 3 ‘R’s’ - Regroup, Review, Refine

As your team and business goals evolve, so should your training. After you’ve completed a training needs analysis and the employee has finished their training program, review the outcomes and finesse your approach as needed:

How did the training analysis inform your training program development?

How did the training improve employee performance?

How was the learner’s experience, and how can it be improved?

How did the training push the company towards achieving their goals?

What is the return on investment, and how can it be improved?

A list of our courses that we can work with you on both delivery and potential customisation (based on awarding body):

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