Before you even start assessing your current situation, it is good to remind yourself of your business goals and current or future risks and opportunities. Draft out one of those good old SWOT analyses to help you identify critical activities that need to be carried out in order to achieve growth and/or avoid potential threats. Do not forget to check potential legal mandates, such as health and safety regulations.
Then you can move on to assessing whether or not your team possesses all the competencies needed for meeting your goals. Tools such as feedback from your customers or business partners, performance monitoring and suggestions from your employees will give you an idea about the areas of your business activities that could use some improvement. Equally important is to keep future changes in mind. Take into account any new technologies or products. Are you planning on promoting some of your employees or hiring new ones? That is significant too.
In short, you want to perform a gap analysis mapping the discrepancy between where you need to be, and what you are currently experiencing. What you are left with here are the problematic areas, but not necessarily all of them can or should be solved by training.
2. Eliminate Other Possible Causes of Problems
Before you herd all your employees to courses and evening classes, reflect for a bit the nature of the deficiencies you have discovered. Are your expectations realistic? Could the flaws be caused by bad management, lack of motivation or insufficient systems and equipment rather than incompetency? Also, consider whether training will be effective. Are your employees willing to learn? Do you know what their preferred learning style is? Do not ignore clues from the potential trainees; otherwise you might be throwing money out the window.
3. Prioritise
By now you have a solid list of training needs, but unless your budget (and time) allocated for training and development is not unlimited, you must determine which are to be addressed, and which will have to wait. You should distinguish between your actual needs (essential) and your perceived needs – wants (desirable, but not crucial). Of course, you will want to address the actual needs.
Draft out an Importance/Competence matrix. Divide your list of actual training needs into four boxes: 1. high importance and low competence, 2. high importance and high competence, 3. low importance and low competence and 4. low importance and high competence. In this diagram, box number 1 will have the highest training priority, boxes 2 and 3 low priority, and box 4 zero priority, since these competencies are both hardly relevant and already mastered by your employees.
4. Layout the Training Program
Once you have established which competencies need to be trained, you can start looking for the most suitable training options. It is advisable that you put together a set of clear objectives – training goals, which you can later evaluate and thus assess the success of the training. You can also choose to set up a pilot training and review the outcome first, instead of diving straight into a complex training scheme.
Veronika Bacova