How to best understand the training needs of your staff

Ensuring that your staff receive the right training to perform their roles is a business imperative.

While you may succeed in only hiring skilled and well qualified applicants, the fact is that there are always many processes and systems particular to a business which need to be learned by incoming staff before they can truly become productive assets.

Some new starters will require more coaching than others – and vice versa. Some will be quick on the uptake but others may need some extra guidance.

So how do you know that your new employees are getting exactly the training that they need, as opposed to simply what everyone else gets?

It's simple: gauge the training needs of your staff by conducting a training needs analysis survey.

This is a pre-training assessment which will let management know exactly which skills and systems staff need coaching in.

The great thing about a training needs analysis template is that it can be tailored specifically to your business so that you are getting an accurate picture of the training needs of your new recruits.

Once you find out what staff need to be trained in, you can then set about implementing a training program which responds to their individual needs.

This means that you can guarantee you get the maximum return on the important investment you make in your staff when you train them.

To ensure the process is an ongoing success, you can pair a pre-training survey with a training evaluation form to see what your employees have retained after training is complete.

This can be implemented regularly over the initial months of an employee's time with your company to ensure that they stay on the right track all the way to becoming a real asset to your business.