How to – Pinpoint Your Training Needs When planning for developmental and skill training programs, there are some critical steps necessary for making sure that training is a solid developmental resource. They include:

Identifying competency or success-factor information

These are the knowledge, skills, abilities, behaviors, and characteristics that represent the fundamental skill or behavioral components of a job. In short, they are the things people must know and be able to do in order to perform a set of job requirements. Even if you think you know all there is to know, start with a blank piece of paper, and create a thorough inventory of everything it takes to do the job well.

Build profiles

If one objective of the developmental effort is to establish specific job requirement information, it makes sense to construct job profiles using the previously created success factors. Making useful job profiles start with the establishment of two important criteria:

• the critically (importance) of each success factor
• the proficiency level (degree of mastery required) for each factor.
Remember that you are creating a profile of the job, not the person doing the job. People often go to their strengths, and positions take on the focus of the person who does them, rather than what the position may require.

Assess employees

You can develop reasonably accurate pictures of employee strengths and weaknesses by building on the competency and success-factor models. A good rule of thumb is to gather information from the employee, the employees' immediate supervisor, and two of the employee's peers (have the employee choose one and the supervisor choose one.)

Identify gaps

After you create an employee profile, you can compare it to the previously established job profile in order to identify the most logical and critical gaps in development. Compare the required levels of competency to the actual levels. The difference between the two is the gap. Once you've made this kind of comparison, you could create a summary of all employees relative to their job requirements. That then can be used to identify group developmental needs, to target and focus training needs and dollars, to select employees for promotions an to determine the distance the group needs to move in order to be brought up to acceptable levels of performance.

Identify options

Development options can be linked to three basic sets of activities:
1. Formal, in-house programs, designed to provide training and developmental options;
2. External programs; workshops, seminars and formal classes that address identified competencies
3. Internal, on-the-job experiences that are identified as sources of growth and development

Follow Through

This sounds so simple, but many organizations fail to follow through. The message sent to employees is that the process stops with the training assessment. Some type of mechanism should be put in place to commend and reinforce desired behavior. People need to see and hear tangible rewards for their efforts, even if it simply interest in their development on the part of their manager. People tend to do what gets noticed.

Whatever method you use to determine your training needs for the coming year, keep your objectives in mind - What would you like to see happen as a result of your assessment? What would you like to see someone do more of? What would you like them to do less of?

Once you answer that question, then ask - What are you willing to do to ensure the results you want? How much time, money and human energy are you, and your organization willing to invest in developing your talent?

Labels: profiles, success, Training

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