A Guide to the Training Needs Analysis Template

A training needs analysis template is far more than just something you download from the internet, it’s a roadmap of your team’s skills relative to your company’s biggest objectives. We like to think of it as a strategic device that makes certain there’s not one dollar spent on training that isn’t coming back with a real metric attached to its actual impact.

Why TNA Is Your Strategic Growth Engine

Before I delve into the actual template however, let’s come to terms about why a training needs analysis (TNA) would be the ideal solution for longer term success. It’s very easy to see it as just another administrative task, when in fact it’s a diagnostic tool for your organisational health.

A good TNA moves you away from reactive gut feel decision making to a proactive data driven approach.

Without a proper analysis of these factors, it’s all too easy to find that training budgets are used on generic courses which aren’t quite right. A TNA prevents this by identifying the specific competencies your teams lack and tying those gaps directly to your business objectives. If for example, you identify that you want to boost customer retention by 15%, a TNA might show you that your support team need advanced conflict resolution training, rather than just another generic communication workshop.

From Cost Centre to Strategic Investment

A TNA is, if you will, a guarantee that the money you invest in training returns. That intense focus is one reason the corporate training industry has taken off. The size of the Australian corporate training market surge was worth AUD 5.19 billion in 2024 and will power ahead to AUD 9.81 billion by 2034 . Why? Because companies are waking up to the benefits of targeted training, not least in terms of uptime and their ability to keep pace with fresh technology.

When you understand where the real needs are, that’s when you can train toward true, measurable, positive change in your business. This could look like:

• Instructing staff in software skills that automate manual and tedious processes to increase productivity
• Increase retention by showing employees that you’re invested in their career paths and theirs with the company’s future
• Becoming more nimble by reskilling your people before fresh market changes or technologies disrupt your industry

A well designed TNA turns the table on viewing training as a cost and makes it a growth engine. It links employee progression with company objectives, leading to a more skilled and engaged workforce ready for coming challenges.

Here is how a considered TNA transforms business results versus an unplanned ad hoc strategy.

Comparison of Strategic and Reactive Training Methodologies

Metric	Strategic TNA Approach	Reactive Training Approach
Budget Allocation	Targeted at high ROI areas	Frequently on generic or “flavour of the month” courses
Employee Engagement	High, since training is related to and supports career goals	Low, because training can come across as irrelevant or a tick box exercise
Skill Gaps	Systematically identified and closed	Dealt with sporadically, resulting in lingering holes
Business Impact	Plays directly to key business goals and objectives	The impact can be murky and hard to measure
Organisational Agility	Forecasts the labour force proactively for impending requirements	Always playing catch up to market changes

As the table above demonstrates, the progress is stark. It becomes well organised so you know what you are doing rather than just feeling like some sort of a chore even though it is really an investment in your company.

The Benefit of Structured Approach

A well conducted TNA provides you with clarity to take intelligent decisions. It allows you to separate the symptoms (such as missed sales targets) from the root causes (a lack of negotiation skills) . This difference is absolutely vital to designing training that really gets results.

If you’re in need of a wider scope of tools and approaches for growing your organisation, you might benefit from some other business resources. The bottom line is that a training needs analysis template is the first step to creating a more competitive and adaptable workforce.

Getting Your Foundation Right

Even before you begin to contemplate bringing in a survey, a really strong Training Needs Analysis (TNA) forms the backbone of all our product development. I’ve watched it again and again, diving right into data collection with no clear goals. It’s a bit like driving on a road trip with no map: You’ll be busy for sure, but you’re unlikely to wind up in any useful place.

The first thing you need to do is decide what success actually means for your business. The goals you establish need to be specific, measurable and linked directly back to your company’s broader strategic ambitions. Don’t bother with the generic goals such as “improve communication”, they’re far too nebulous to give you anything to work toward.

You need to get specific. A far better goal might be: “Increase the sales team’s deal closure rate by 10 per cent over the next quarter through improving product insights and negotiating skills.” See the difference? This gives you a really strong target and ties the training directly to a business result that makes it a lot easier (and more likely) for us to be able to justify the investment and measure on.

Defining Your Scope and Objectives

Before cracking open a training needs analysis template, you have to know what the scope of your project is. And is it the whole organisation or just a department that you are considering looking at or taking a job in? Setting this boundary from the very start is important to keep the project manageable and not grow out of control.

Once you have your scope dialled in, what needs to happen next for your objectives is that they need to answer a few fundamental questions:

• What’s the business problem we’re really trying to solve? High employee turnover, sagging customer satisfaction scores or an inability to keep pace with fresh software?
• So what are the lights at the end of the tunnel, performance improvements we need to look for? Try to frame it as something you can measure. This might involve cutting the time taken between a customer support ticket being raised or raising production on the factory floor
• How will we be able to determine whether the training has indeed succeeded? Your success metrics need to be set up at the very start, not as an afterthought

This bit of prep work turns your TNA from a wide ranging course survey into a targeted research mission.

Engaging Key Stakeholders for Buy In

An HR silo approach to analysis is bound to fail. You 100 per cent need buy in from the right people to make sure that any data you collect is accurate but just as important, to make sure that when it comes time for the final training plan, it will have what it needs to succeed. Your stakeholders are not just senior leadership, they’re a wide variety of opinions that you need to hear from.

A TNA is team work. Getting stakeholders in early means the process isn’t just another HR thing, but a shared business commitment with all the benefits that this brings.

Your list of stakeholders should represent a diversity of perspectives:

• Senior Leadership are essential to securing budget for this and making sure your TNA fits with business strategy at the highest level
• Managers who work on the store floor know first hand what a member of their team struggles with and has issues with each day
• Your High Achievers are your benchmark of excellence. They can help you figure out what “good” even looks like in their roles
• HR and L&D Professionals as those who will be leading the process and delivering to training programs

And involving these constituencies is not just a way of round tripping a rubber stamp, it’s about collecting divergent information. A manager may mark a performance issue but an employee on their team may identify an inefficient process or inadequate tools as the true cause. And that’s the key point that this big picture lens brings you to.

Communicating the Process Clearly

Finally clear communication is very important, so never ignore it. Let’s get real, employees can become suspicious of anything that appears to be a test or challenge of their skills. It’s your job to portray the TNA as something positive, an investment in their professional development and a sincere attempt at making their jobs easier and more satisfying.

Explain what the process will be, what the timetable looks like, precisely how their input will be used. This kind of transparency is confidence building and will promote the honest constructive feedback you require. Once you know the basic requirements of batch training and the recruiting and development decisions available to you, you can better explain what’s in it for everyone. A well communicated plan helps to manage expectations and prepare for a successful analysis.

Maximising TNA Template Value

A solid good training needs analysis template is more than just a checkbox, it’s a blueprint for success. Think of it as your map, guiding you from the high level business ambitions at left to the specific skills that your people will need on the ground. It helps you distil what can seem like a huge task into discrete, addressable stages.

The process itself can essentially be broken down into three main stages, each stage supporting the previous one. That is the structure that keeps you from simply guessing what training people need. By contrast you’ll be basing your decisions on hard evidence that you’ve gleaned from the right sources.

As you can see, a good analysis must always begin with clear business goals and end with knowing exactly where to focus the skills building efforts of your organisation.

Step 1: The Context, Analysing the Organisation as a Whole

Before you get to specific skills, you’ve got to come in high. All aims in the programme of training are related to company policy. This is the question you’re going to answer: “In order for us to achieve our strategic objective, what does our workforce need to be capable of doing?”

In your template you will have sections that will make you consider these key business drivers. For example let’s say your company is releasing fresh software. A top priority would be to make sure the sales team can show it off flawlessly. With the TNA you can capture this objective and identify which departments and positions are essential to achieving it.

At this point you’re probably going back over things such as:

• What the company’s strategic business plans are and where it is headed
• Resources on hand: What is the budget? What technology do we have? And who are our internal experts?
• Output performance indicators internal to the workforce, like personnel who leave or scores for staff engagement

By beginning here you make sure that anything you later propose for training is even relevant and supports the company’s direction. And it’s the best way to prevent wasting money on programs that sound good but don’t solve a real business problem.

Next, Get Granular: Task Analysis

After you hash out your organisational objectives it’s time to get in the weeds. The Task Analysis (also sometimes referred to as a Role Analysis) is the place you systematically deconstruct the exact skills, knowledge and performance contributions necessary for someone to perform well in a significant role. In essence you’re setting the standard for what “great” looks like in that job.

So if you’re analysing a role such as “Customer Service Representative” your analysis might be that key competencies include:

• Active listening skills
• Problem solving on the fly
• Experience with the company’s CRM application or similar system
• Experience with returns and warranty processes

To nail this you’re going to need to speak with your top performing employees and with the managers of those employees. They’ll provide you with a sense of what the job really entails day to day. Your template training needs analysis then offers you a structured environment to record all of this material and effectively provides a reference point to compare current performance against.

The Last Piece: Pinpointing Gaps Through Individual Analysis

This is the last piece of the puzzle. In Individual Analysis you compare the needed job skills (from your Task Analysis) to what an employee has. You’re looking for the exact gaps, this is how you figure out who needs training and in which areas.

It’s important here to get information from a couple different places. Relying on only one approach you are likely to end up with a partial or slanted view.

Your goal is to develop a full picture of an employee’s performance. When you take feedback from a manager, blend it with employees’ own assessments and hard performance data you get a much more accurate and useful read of their development needs.

Your template should ask you to enter input by displaying:

• Performance Appraisals: This is a trove of known, documented to dos already
• Manager Feedback: Managers observe their teams working every day and see the problems they encounter
• Pulse Surveys and Self Assessment: Just inquire with employees about where they feel like they need more help. It’s all about how you ask the questions and get honest answers

For example, instead of saying “Are you bad at time management?” rather the question “Which of the following is most likely to help you manage your workload successfully?” would be more appropriate. This little change makes it always result in constructive feedback without putting people on the defensive.

The quality of the data that you collect here will directly determine how effective your training plan is going to be and this is one of the main reasons why training materials are important for achieving any real learning outcome. However, as you take this 3 stage process by the numbers, your TNA template becomes a super powerful mechanism to establish a smart and targeted training strategy.

From Insight to Action: Building Your Effective Training Plan

Gathering all of that information with the help of your training needs analysis template is a great start but the real magic isn’t in what you collect: it’s in what you do next. All that raw data, surveys, performance reviews or one on one chats, is little more than noise until you begin to sift through it for patterns. This is where you write up your results in an actionable prioritised plan.

What you do first is mix the numbers, say response scores from surveys, with a little human insight, comments by focus teams. Look for the common threads. Do several departments note the importance of better project management skills? Do your junior team members have an insatiable thirst for coaching? It’s in identifying these patterns that you can determine where the biggest skills gaps lie in your company.

Figuring Out What’s Most Important

So why can’t you patch every training gap at once? Let’s keep it real here: there is no way you should even be trying to do so. Smart planning is a matter of choices and priorities. I’ve discovered that a simple yet effective method to prioritise is to balance each training requirement against three key factors.

This approach allows you to do more than respond to the loudest voices, it enables you to target your limited resources where they’ll have the most impact.

• Business Impact: Does this skill gap play directly into a key business goal? Think more sales, better customer retention or quicker project turnarounds
• Extent of Need: How big is the problem? A skill gap as an issue facing a whole department will always win over an obstacle affecting only one or two people
• Urgency: How soon will the business feel pain if you do nothing? Compliance, safety or mission critical gaps are those the company usually needed to address yesterday

Opting for the Appropriate Training Approach

With a clear picture of your priorities the next step is to determine how you’ll provide the training. There is no one size fits all solution and anything suggesting that will ultimately fail. There is no one size fits all best method, it depends on what skill you are trying to teach and how your team actually learns.

For example bringing people up to speed on what the fresh software can do often works great in self paced e learning modules they can work through at a time of their choosing. If it’s something like leadership or communication however, you need dynamic hands on practice that live workshops and team coaching provides. Mix it up. Do not be afraid to mix and match, hybrid method is usually the best option.

An actionable plan for training is not simply a list of courses. It’s a plan that spells where you are headed and when, comes with a sound budget to reach the destination and holds you accountable by having measurable success factors directly linked to your business objectives as set at the outset.

And it’s a process that many businesses in the skill starved Australian marketplace are following to nurture talent from within. As Greg Anderson from Veretto observed, “When we used a training needs analysis template we identified a severe gap in data skills. We implemented a specialised Excel training initiative that led to a 25% increase in productivity. The costs saved paid for the training in less than six months.”

Good training is not only healthy for the people you already employ but also an asset when recruiting fresh talent. That is why high quality training resources can double the speed of recruitment and onboarding.

And naturally, once your plan is in place you want to know if it’s working. This is where measuring training effectiveness becomes vital to your ongoing success.

What Workforce Data Really Tells You

Let’s take for example a national survey of Australian health professionals. In that study when asked to rate how important the team as a whole rated leadership and continuous improvement as the top need. However if you ask them how much they personally needed help with, then number one need was managing work life balance. This is a perfect example of why an attitudinal analysis must go beyond job specific tasks to get at what the workforce really cares about.

The Pitfall of Analysis Without Action

Seriously this is the worst possible mistake you can make: conducting an indepth analysis and then failing to act on any of it. This can have long term and very serious consequences.

When you request input and then do nothing with it, what you communicate to your employees is their opinion doesn’t matter. Not only is this morale destroying but it also makes sure they will do next to nothing real on future plays.

So how do you avoid falling into these traps? It all boils down to a clear plan for the analysis and another for the follow through.

• Secure leadership buy in early on. Make sure leaders are leading the charge from the beginning and you have committed what’s needed to act on whatever you uncover
• Involve managers in question design. Department managers are here every day. Their responses help me formulate neutral questions that strike at the heart of the paradox
• Make clear when we should act. Start communicating at the outset about when people will know what results you get and see initial training mechanisms come out. It holds you accountable and lets them know you mean business

Handling these challenges up front will help you to guarantee your training needs analysis template produces believable worthwhile results that translate into genuine development for your team.

Your TNA Template Questions Answered

As you dive into a training needs analysis do you find yourself asking questions? I’m going to run through a few of the top ones I hear from my own clients, so you can move ahead without fear.

How Much and How Often Should We Do This

This is the question I get asked more than anything. Well there’s no one perfect answer but a good rhythm is to do a full scale TNA at least once every year. Consider it your company’s annual physical.

But don’t just set it and forget it. You will also want to run smaller more targeted analyses when something big changes in the business.

Watch for triggers such as:

• Introducing fresh software or machinery
• Shifting your business strategy or disrupting an entirely fresh market
• An unexpected decline in performance and alarming results from a certain team
• A surprising uptick in staff turnover in one department

An interesting way to think about is that your annual TNA equals the yearly check up at the doctor, where as these smaller ad hoc analysis are more “I have a sore thumb, I need this looking at”. This mix keeps a training program fresh and up to date.

Is This Template Suitable for the Size of My Business

Absolutely. Regardless if you represent a five person startup or the biggest company in the world, the training needs analysis template scales to fit your organisation. The basic concepts are universal, the way you fetch the information is what differs.

For smaller businesses the undertaking can be a more personal one. The odds are better that you will end up with one on one conversations with all your employees, almost person to person discussions about what managers see going on the floor day in and day out. The template just provides a framework to help make sure those conversations are focused and you don’t forget anything critical.

You need a more prescriptive approach to handle the scale in a large enterprise. You may rely on tools like online surveys to take the broad pulse of hundreds of employees, then dig deeper in focus teams or with interviews with key managers. In this case the template is vital to standardise the way you capture that information so you can compare apples with apples across different departments and discover those big company wide skill gaps.

But My Team Doesn’t Want to Participate

Employee curiosity isn’t easy to come by. It frequently arises from a fear that the TNA is really a covert performance review or a method of identifying who had underperforming. The only way to overcome this is through completely open and honest communication in the beginning.

Make no mistake: This is not about assigning blame. Position the entire exercise as an investment in their growth and careers. You are doing this to provide better support, tools and training for them so your job is easier and they can be more successful.

Ask for honest feedback and promise confidentiality. And finally you actually have to do something about it. Share the main results with everyone and show them the action plan you came up with by their input. Get people to see that their feedback is driving positive change and they’ll be queuing up to provide input next time.