Training Needs Assessment

Training Needs Assessment

The purpose of training needs assessment is to identify performance requirements and the knowledge, skills and abilities needed by an organization's workforce to achieve the requirements. A needs assessment is the process of identifying the "gap" between performance required and current performance. When a difference exists, it explores the causes for the gap and methods for eliminating the gap.

Levels of Training Needs Assessment

There are three levels of training needs assessment:

1) Organizational Analysis: involves determining the appropriateness of training, given the organization's business strategy, its resources available for training, and support by managers and peers for training

2) Person Analysis: involves determining if the performance issues result from lack of knowledge, skills or from a motivational or work-design problem. It also involves identifying who needs training and determining the employees' readiness for training.

3) Task Analysis: involves identifying the important tasks and knowledge, skill and behaviors that need to be emphasized in training for employees to complete their tasks.

Methods Used In Needs Assessment

To conduct a successful needs assessment several methods can be used including organizational surveys, observations, interviews, business documents etc. I have used the following methods in needs assessment to determine the needs of training:

1) Business Documents: The two very important documents that I have used for this needs assessment are:

a) Customer Satisfaction Survey: We have Maritz surveys where we ask our customers a series of questions related with their overall satisfaction of their calls to the benefit centers. These are the quarterly surveys and provide the satisfaction scores in percentages.

b) Call Tracker Topics and Repeat Callers Analysis: We have repeat callers reports to determine why people are calling in multiple times and what the call tracker topic was to narrow down what topics the training should take place around.

c) Call Recordings with Screen Captures: Our organization also uses the recording of the calls along with the screen captures of each call for better call reviews. Usually when the managers conduct the side by side call reviews, the CSRs try to do their best for that particular call review and thus the managers don't get to see the real review. So using the screen captures methods help to evaluate: if the CSRs use their tools on each call, how effectively they are using their tools, how long a customer was put on hold and how confident they were while on the call providing the information to the caller. So reviewing the calls with screen captures was very helpful in conducting the needs assessment as it provided me very clear and honest information.

2) Organizational Surveys: was the next step to look at the customer service reps CSRs thoughts about the organization itself, about their own skills and knowledge and also about their thoughts on the tools and information provided to them to do their job.

3) Observations: On the job observation was also helpful but it could be misleading sometimes depending upon any other factors outside of the job. But some of job related activities that could be observed was like how often do the CSRs ask other teammates or managers to assist them while on the call, how confident they sounded on their calls etc.

Evaluation of the Data

The company hires Benefits Operations Administrators to calculate the pension benefits for a specific client's employees; therefore, the customer service reps were not trained on any details in regards to how to calculate the pension benefits for the customers. But these Benefits Operations Administrators are not allowed to take any incoming calls inquiring about the calculations done by them. So based upon the data I have gathered, I would strongly recommend the need of training for the Customer Service Representatives CSRs in regards to the pension calculations. I see there was unnecessary work tickets opened up in regards to find out the answers to the callers' inquiries about their pension calculations. Training the customer service reps would also help reducing the time and cost involved in completing these work tickets. I went through the tools available to us while on calls and noticed they do not provide any detailed information. Most of the newly trained people were complaining about not finding the required info in or tools. The experienced CSRs were not able to answer any questions pertaining to defined benefits calculations either. We were rated so low in the knowledge area itself. The repeat callers list was not going down coz of the same issue. Customers were calling back over and again to get into the depth of their inquiries. So overall, it is impacting our customer satisfaction scores and rating us very poor at our knowledge level. The only way we can increase the customer satisfaction and retain the customers are by training our customer service reps on how to calculate the pension benefits themselves and be able to answer any questions in regards to calculations on the initial call. This training would not only help us achieving the organizational goal but would also enhance our job skills required to move up in the organization.

Designing Training Program

Training design refers to factors built into the training program to increase the chances that transfer of training will occur. Every training program must address some vital issues such as:

1) Who participate in the program? According to the needs analysis, only senior representative should be selected for this training. They are the ones who have been handling these pension benefits related calls for so long now and are more experienced. So training these seniors would be helpful to begin with.

2) Who are the trainers? The training programs can be conducted by several different people including managers, consultants and even clients itself but for this specific training Benefits Operation Manager ( BOM) will be the right person to conduct this training. A BOM is in charge of maintaining our clients plan provisions and have all the in depth details directly from the client itself to have the better understanding of any formulas/provisions/rules used in calculating the pension benefits for all the employees of that particular client.

3) What methods and techniques are to be used for training? There are different methods to use for training mainly grouped in two categories: a) On the job- training methods are applied