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Identifying Participants’
Needs
A good needs analysis has three basic steps.
Understand who your participants are. Your training is designed specifically to meet
the needs of every person in the workshop, right? The answer is yes, of course it is,
but there are others who require consideration before you deliver your course.
These people include:
The supervisor or manager who has identified a need for training. Find out what their
expectations are for the training, and be sure to incorporate those items into your session.
Who is paying for the training? This might be the trainee, the supervisor, or a manager in a
different department altogether. What are their expectations of training, and what outcomes
will they insist on?
If you can meet the needs of your participants (all three of them), you are much more likely to achieve
success in your training, and to be asked to return for more training!
You’ll also have to determine whether all of the concerns outlined by the participants, supervisors, and
payers are real needs. This should come to light in your needs assessment.
Conducting a needs assessment is the best way to determine what your training needs to include. For
example, a manager may come to you and say that staff in the contact center are consistently talking
too long on the phone and yet not making enough sales. They need training on closing and time
management. When you speak to the customer service representatives, they may tell you that they
keep their calls as short as possible; however, they cannot seem to shorten the call and still make a sale.
They also feel that they need training in closing and time management. Since both groups have
identified the same problem in their interviews, you may think that you need to provide training in
closing the sale and time management. However, if you also spend a day observing the high performing
and low performing CSR’s, you may find that they both spend their time in exactly the same way, but
the difference is just in the closing.
As a result, you determine that training is needed on closing sales, not time management. Since the
CSR’s and their supervisors perceive that time management is also an issue, you will want to devote
some energy to that topic, but your main focus is going to be on closing sales.