Question
You are the internal training manager of your organization. As a staff of one, you are the main contact for everyone who needs training or who thinks they need training.
Because you are a department of one, you consistently call upon members within the organization when it comes to determining training needs, developing and delivering the training, and then determining if the training actually met the needs. Of course, if there are needs in which there is no organizational expertise, it may be necessary to outsource some of the training by hiring external vendors.
Throughout the course, you will be asked to perform specific training functions based on the material you have learned in the unit. When performing the specific training function, keep in mind the various people in the organization who can lend support, such as the manager of the trainees and the trainees themselves. Indicate how you will draw on their resources in your responses to the discussion questions, individual projects, and group project.
In this unit, you will design a needs analysis survey in the form of a Word document for 1 of the following positions:
Accountant
Human resource generalist
Customer service representative
In the document, please include the questions you would ask to perform a(n):
Organizational analysis
Job analysis
Individual analysis
To help you identify the type of work each of these functions performs, check out the Occupational Outlook Handbook published by the U.S. Department of Labor – Bureau of Labor Statistics (using the resources in course materials). Perform your search by job title (such as sales representative) or by using an alphabetical search.
After you finish creating your survey, answer the following questions in the same document:
How will you use your survey (individual interviews, focus groups, and self-administered questionnaires)? You may administer different parts of the needs analysis to different groups or use different methods.
Explain your reasoning for why you will collect data in this way. What are the advantages and disadvantages of the different methods?
Why would a human resources development specialist conduct a needs analysis?
Answer
With the constant changes in the organization processes and all the changes in technology in the world today, there is the need for an organization to take the action of teaching their workers particular skills. Training may take various forms such as the action of undertaking a course of exercise to sharpen individual’s skills and knowledge in the preparation of a task ahead of them. However, training may take various forms such as seminars, workshops refresher courses, and conferences. The main purpose of an organization to train their workers is to ensure that they keep abreast with changes in the world market, to increase their productivity as well as their efficiency and effectiveness. However, as an internal training manager, an individual needs to identify training needs before embarking on training the organization workers and individuals. Identification of the training needs is followed by the development of the training process and then finally the delivery of the training. However, after the training, the training manager should always seek to evaluate the effectiveness of the training by evaluating whether the training needs were successfully fulfilled and satisfied (Gupta, 2011). This paper seeks to conduct a needs analysis survey for the position of human resource generalist.
The human resource department is one of the most important departments in an organization bearing in mind it plays the role of staffing whereby it involves in hiring qualified workers. As a result, the department should always be careful with the kind of people it hires since the character of an individual employee counts a lot despite having the necessary skills and knowledge.
Part 1
Organization analysis
This section comprises of the process of reviewing the development, work environment personnel and the daily operation of business. Organization analysis contains more than one aspect that is paramount to the success of an individual organization. Below are some of the questions that need to be answered to help a training manager device and develop a good training program.
- As an employee, state your name,
- Your job title
- Number of years worked in the organization
- Qualifications:
- What do you feel about the organization structure?
- What changes would you like the organization to conduct to ensure employees welfare and wellbeing is fully observed?
- Does the organization culture favor the employees and provide a safe heaven?
- How do you rate the organizational technology?
- What upgrades do you think should be implemented to increase the productivity and efficiency of all employees?
- Which organization processes do you feel they hinder employees from fully performing their duties?
Job analysis
Job analysis comprises of the process of identifying and determining the details about particular job duties and responsibilities and the relative importance of these duties (Michelson, 2013). Some of the questions that should be put in this section include:
- State the duties and tasks of the job title.
- How well do you consider the duties you are performing currently?
- How important are these duties and activities to the performance of your job and the overall performance of the organization?
- How do you find the relationship between the top level management and junior staff?
- Please specify the areas of your job that you fell they should be revised to make them better and suitable.
- Please specify particular areas in your job that you would like to receive further training or instruction as well as their importance.
- How do you find the overall environment in your workplace?
- How well do you know all the tools and equipment under your job specialty?
- Please specify tools and equipment that you need further training in.
Individual analysis
The individual analysis comprises of the process to determine whether individual employees are performing to the required standards. This section usually deals with the determination of an employee’s existing skills and competencies, their individual learning styles and capacity for new work. Some of the questions that would help to do this analysis include:
- What skills do you possess?
- Do you think there is the need to add or increase your skills? If yes which?
- Do you think you can multitask? If yes why? If no why?
- How well can you cope with a new job?
- Which new job do you think you can perform best?
- What are your strengths?
- What are your weaknesses?
Part 2
- To ensure that I have captured all the necessary information, I would use questionnaires that will be distributed to different groups and the correspondents can fill them at their own comfort.
- A questionnaire is a research instrument that consists a series of question with a sole aim of collecting raw data from correspondents. Some of the advantages of this method include:
- An individual can collect a large amount of information within a short period and minimal cost.
- Questionnaires can be analyzed more scientifically and objectively than other forms of research(Iqbal, 2011).
- Disadvantages of this method include
- There is no method or an instrument that can be employed to measure the truthfulness of a respondent
- The respondents may be forgetful or not thinking within the full context of the situation.
- The importance of need analysis include:
- Through the need analysis, the organization can determine the need for training their workers.
- Through the need, analysis helps to answer various questions such as how relevant training is to the employees.
References
Gupta, K. (2011). A practical guide to needs assessment. John Wiley & Sons.
Iqbal, M. Z. (2011). The growing concept and uses of training needs assessment: A review with proposed model. Journal of European Industrial Training, 35(5),, 439-466.
Michelson, L. S. (2013). Social skills assessment and training with children: An empirically based handbook. . Springer Science & Business Media.
