How to Identify Your Organizational Training Needs

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When you find yourself thinking about your company’s organizational training needs, it’s important to remember that different organizations require personnel who possess different sets of skills and expertise. Specialists and experts who are desperately needed in one organization may not be particular important in another. 

This is why organizations must always consider the skills of their personnel and whether or not, their skills are relevant to the company’s long term needs. So if you and your company are currently having a few problems with organizational training then here are a few things that will help put things into perspective. 

How to Identify Your Organizational Training Needs

Consider Your Organization’s Long Term Goals

First of all, you will need to think about your company’s long term goals, as opposed to its short term needs. Organizational training is ultimately a long term investment. Investing time and resources in employee development programs that yield limited, short term results is not only a bad investment, it’s also waste of time. Skills must always have long term viability, and they need to deliver considerable return-on-investments in order to become good investments. What this basically means is that the training that you provide to your personnel must remain useful ten or even fifteen years down the road, otherwise the training that they receive will have limited value. 

For example, if you know with certainty that a particular software or equipment will become obsolete in less than two years then it follows that those skills which are exclusively associated with those equipment will become obsolete as well. Therefore, any training program which focuses on these increasingly obsolete tools and equipment are not good investments and should be avoided if possible. 

What Kind of Technologies, Systems and Procedures Does Your Company Frequently Use? 

Another way to determine your organizational training needs is to simply look at the kinds of tools, systems and procedures that your company uses regularly. For example, if your organization owns a large number of heavy industrial equipment then safety enhancement programs will be a good investment for your company. Likewise, if your organization is a marketing firm then your employee training programs should focus on the latest marketing techniques and solutions. 

Therefore, in establishing organizational training programs for your employees and personnel, it’s always important to consider those departments, tools and strategies which could be considered critical to the success and survival of your organization as a whole. If you fail to take these factors into consideration then the success of your organizational training strategy will be greatly compromised. 

Determine Who Are your Core Personnel 

Organizational training should only be given to core personnel, and what we mean by core personnel are those employees who are most important to the success of your company. To put it plainly, your organization’s core personnel are those employees who are not expendable. They are the kind of personnel that your organization needs to retain on a long term basis, which is why you will need to invest in their training and expertise. 

In contrast, non-essential personnel are the kind of personnel which are not critical to your organization’s operations, and are therefore expendable. Now, it’s important to remember that these two categories are not mutually exclusive. Some core personnel can become expendable over a sufficient amount of time, while some non-essential employees have the potential of becoming core personnel if given the appropriate amount of training. 

However, the point to remember here is that you can’t always train all of your personnel, and sometimes, it’s best to focus your resources on those personnel who you think are most valuable to your organization’s interests. In this way, you will be able to optimize your training strategy without increasing its attendant costs and risks. 

What Are Some Possible Areas of Development Within Your Organization

In dealing with organizational training, it’s important to consider possible areas of development within your company. These areas could be administration, technology, marketing or even customer service. In any case, if you think these areas need to be upgraded then there’s a good chance that they do need improvement, and one of the best ways to improve a critical component of an organization is by training the relevant personnel. 

For example, if you expect your quality control department to undergo some upgrades in the next two years then you will need to train the appropriate personnel ahead of time. The point here is that as an organization grows, its personnel will need to acquire and master new skills and proficiencies in order to adapt to their new tasks. 

Therefore, if you are concerned about your company’s organizational training needs then you should observe the direction of your company’s long term growth. Basically, if you know what your organization will be like 5 years from now, you will also know what kind of employees and personnel it will need. 

Identify Problems With Your Existing Employee Development Strategy 

Sometimes, organizational training is not just about creating effective personnel development and training programs. In some cases, it’s also about identifying problems in your organization’s employee development strategy. For example, some training strategies have very rigid contents, which is to say they are not very responsive to changing events, necessities and organizational dynamics. Because of this inflexibility, any training programs that the company initiates will be effectively inefficient. 

So if you want to serve your organizational training needs then you will need to identify the flaws in your company’s employee training strategies. Addressing these flaws ahead of time will allow your organization to more easily address the training needs of your personnel, and make the employee development goals process more efficient on the long run. 

Conclusion 

Organizations that invest heavily in personnel training and development need to keep in mind that their interests are best served if they consider the long term needs of their company. How your organization understands these needs will help to define the goals, strategies and tools that it will use in shaping the skills and qualifications of its personnel. So remember that these are the kinds of issues that you must always keep in mind when dealing with your company’s organizational training needs. Additional and relater reading material are available on employee development plan template page.
Jason is the former Lead Author & Editor of TrainingStation Blog