Absolutely – that is, if you don’t want to hear ‘I spent a day in training and didn’t learn anything at all’ from your target audience.
If you are thinking of skipping this step to help save on time and money, DON’T! Conducting a needs analysis, before diving into the design process will save plenty of hassle and mis-fires down the road. It will help to avoid training for the sake of training and will make the process a lot smoother and cost effective for all parties involved.
When starting any training project, this is the first thing that should be done. A needs analysis will help to ensure that there is a return on investment.
It will help you to identify:
- Your target audience (they’re not always who you think)
- Learning outcomes (and therefore, what content is relevant and what isn’t)
- Whether training is even required (it could be other issues causing the problems, like policies or communications)
- Suitable training solutions (what will work best, classroom, online, both?)
Here are THREE simple and practical steps that you can take for conducting an e-Learning needs analysis.
1- Determine the goals of the training
You need to think, as an organization what goals are we trying to achieve by creating this training? How do we want our learners to reach those goals? These questions can be answered by having conversations with the stakeholders and subject matter experts. Although you are designing the course and not meant to be an expert on the desired topic, it is still important for you to have a solid understanding – dig into the topic and even the organization to see what best practices they use. This will help with the design, so it is best suited for your target audience.
2- Determine if there are any performance gaps
For this, you will want to take a closer look at the target audience. You may want to survey, or sit down with some to further discuss, should time and cost be permitted. It is important, when designing e-Learning content, to evaluate current abilities and see if there are gaps from the desired ability – that is, the difference between what learners are supposed to be doing versus what they are they are actually doing today.
3 – Determine the cause of the performance gap
If you really took the time in the previous step, you will have a clear picture of what is causing the performance gap. You will understand why there is a gap and what the cause of the gap is. This will then help you establish whether an e-Learning course (training in general) will help to solve the issue. It is important to note that not all performance gaps are cause by a lack of skill or knowledge. It could be determined that there is a lack of motivation or communication amongst employees.
Source: Tim Slade – Blog
