Thursday, October 30, 2008

Do NOT Be Tempted!

Don't be tempted to skip the Training Needs Analysis. It's easy to claim we are busy or overworked or other. It is critical -- REQUIRED -- that a Training Needs Analysis must be conducted for all new training requests.

Too often (in my industry almost always) there is such a push for training salespeople when revenues are down, but executives don't believe there is any time to wait for proper planning and development to meet the need.

Let me assure you -- if you skip the Training Needs Analysis stage, your training will miss the mark and your training organization will rightly become an excuse for poor performance. There is no "winging it" with training.

As Julie Andrews said: start at the very beginning, it's a very good place to start. Let me rephrase that for our industry: start at the very beginning, with a Training Needs Analysis.

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

Kevin,

You're absolutely right about the needs analysis phase of training. There are several critical success factors with respect to training that provides long-term business improvement: a comprehensive and objective needs assessment, sales processes in place to train to, and post-program reinforcement, mostly in the form of formalized coaching.

Good stuff.