Training Needs Assessment and Analysis

Training needs assessment is a process used to determine how an organization should allocate resources toward training and related performance improvement interventions. Compared with other related areas of study in industrial and organizational (I-O) psychology, most notably training design and training evaluation, this process has received considerably less research attention. Nevertheless, needs assessment is vitally important to ensure training effectiveness and efficiency. Organizations that do not conduct needs assessments are more likely to do too little or too much training, or to develop training programs that do not benefit employees and their organizations.

Full-scale training needs assessments require collecting data on organization, task, and person characteristics. This broad array of data is necessary for determining what training is needed by which employees so the organization can ...