Training Needs Assessment: Identify Key Skills Gaps

Training Needs Assessment Services that Work

“I think we learned a lot in this project. I would definitely look for ways to use your training needs assessment services again. I’m interested in finding ways to do periodic follow-ups to assess progress. The final output was truly a collaboration between our two organizations.

The payoff was the correlation between assessment results and actual performance.”
Director | US Sales Operations | Fortune 500 Technology Firm

With US corporations spending over $100 billion on employee training last year, it is malpractice that 70% of leaders report significant skills gaps in their workforce. Too many corporate training programs either bypass a proper skill gap assessment or they use assessments that are not only statistically invalid, but often inhibit participant trust, decrease learner relevance, and waste everyone’s time.

As stated by Robert A. Humphrey, “An undefined problem has an infinite number of solutions.”

We pride ourselves on a proven training needs assessment service that finds the root cause, creates alignment, initiates the change process, and targets development areas that have the most business AND people impact.

Our training needs assessment services support our core belief in the Transfer of Training™ and the required impact on the business through increased revenue, decreased costs, and/or increased productivity. Our company, group, and individual level assessment tools provide powerful data to:

Understand the current situation
Pinpoint and prioritize skill gaps against a proven standard
Customize training workshops
Initiate the change process
Predispose participants
Guide coaching and Individual Development Plans
Set baseline metrics
Align leadership and employees
Target investments
Determine the root cause
Obtain buy-in

Training needs assessments are offered as an on-demand service. There is no hardware, software, or related infrastructure to purchase and maintain. The end result is a highly available, scalable, and secure application available to participants 24/7 anywhere on the globe.

We believe that the purpose of a training needs assessment should be to answer the questions: “What is holding us back?” and “Where should we focus?”

We also believe that skill assessments should be customized to each unique environment, be outcome-based (not opinion-based), and compare skills to actual performance to guide impactful strategies.

In addition to Leadership Simulation Assessments for High Stakes Roles, 360-degree interviews, People Manager Assessment Centers, and focus groups, LSA Global offers three proven online options that are augmented by key leadership interviews:

Training Needs Assessment Services

1. What Are the Critical “Money Making” Skills?

Leader Assess™ training needs assessment surveys are used to identify the “Money Making” skills. The Leader Assess™ is an online training assessment completed by executives and leaders to help them prioritize skills in three areas:

must have skills areas

Created from a bank of 150+ behaviorally-based questions, the assessment is a proven tool to drive executive alignment, buy-in, and focus. View a sample training assessment question Leader Assess™.

Team-Training-Needs-Assessment-Title

2. Where Are the Key Gaps and Priorities?

Team Assess™ training needs assessment surveys are used to answer the question “What are the strengths and limiters of my team or target audience?” related to our business. The Team Assess™ needs assessment survey is completed by the “masses” to help identify:

Team skill assessment areas

Team Assess™ is a proven tool to drive alignment, buy-in, and focus for a specific target audience.

Individual-Development-Plan-Title

3. What Should I Do Differently?

Individual Development™ Plans are used to answer the question “What can I do about it?” The customized profiles are used to help drive individual performance coaching sessions. Combined with the Leader Assess™ and Team Assess™, the Individual Development™ Plans are an invaluable development tool for one-on-one follow through and development.

Coaching-Scorecard-from-Training-Assessment

LSA Global can deliver each survey in more than a dozen languages simultaneously including English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Hebrew, Swedish, German, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Thai.

If you would like to learn how our training needs assessment expertise has helped leading organizations across multiple industries succeed, please contact us.

Related Information

As a Training Outsourcing Partner, LSA consistently saves me time and money by understanding what matters to our strategy and what works in our unique culture.

Their practical and outcome-oriented methodology is fantastic and allows us to deploy better solutions faster.

I highly recommend them to anyone looking to raise the talent bar with a true strategic partner.

Tim Bonnet
Director of Training and Organizational Development

The experiential New Employee Orientation was an incredible success for 2,500+ new hires over 4 years spread across the globe.

LSA partnered with us to create an innovative solution on very short notice and added a huge amount of value.

We could never have done it without their unmatched combination of expertise, professionalism, and creativity that aligned everything with our unique culture and growth strategy.

Even our executives and experienced hires were blown away!

Brenda Wagner
Founder and President

We have worked with LSA Global for our learning and development needs and have always had great success.

They helped us recently with targeted and customized Management Training Workshops to fit our unique situation, and they were fantastic.

I highly recommend LSA to anyone that is attempting to help take their leadership and management talent to the next level.

Mary Johnston
HR Manager, BU Radiology Informatics

LSA Global has been a great partner in helping us move toward being “the leading developer of talent in the service performance management industry.”

I have engaged LSA to help develop best-in-class programs in the areas of: Executive On-boarding, Manager Training, Sales Training and Coaching, Employee Engagement, and Instructional Design.

They have consistently met or exceeded my (very) high expectations and are always responsive to my needs to increase performance, engagement, customer satisfaction, and sales growth.

Mike Normant
Senior Director, Training & Development

I wanted to let you know how much I enjoyed working with LSA on the design and delivery of the experiential new employee on-boarding training.

I’ve been getting tons of positive unsolicited feedback.

You truly exceeded everyone’s expectations.

Steven Gray
US Enterprise Services

We partnered with LSA Global to help us invest in our people. LSA custom designed an impactful management curriculum to help upskill our key managers and leaders.

We consider LSA to be our trusted learning and development partner and a valued extension of our team as we rapidly scale. Thank you LSA!

Lisa Bruun
SVP Human Resources

We partnered with LSA to help custom design, deliver, and measure an advanced new employee on-boarding process. It was well thought out and bought into by sales leadership. The combination of targeted sales tools, technology, coaching, performance plans, training, and reinforcement made all the difference. The solution quantifiably improved new employee and hiring manager satisfaction and increased the speed to sales quota for new hires.

I would highly recommend LSA Global for any sales enablement team looking to increase the engagement and speed to productivity of their sales force. We are excited to implement the program globally as we continue to scale.

Rochana Golani
Director, Global Sales & Technical Field Enablement

Having a training outsourcing partner like LSA to support our talent management needs has been a real blessing. In an emerging company where typically you can’t afford the infrastructure necessary to provide a full range of offerings, having an external partner like LSA has been a blessing.

They deeply understand our business and our culture. They do a great job on a wide range of customized training, consulting, and coaching solutions for us.

For us, they are definitely better than having our own internal Training and Organizational Development function. They always do what it takes to hit the mark.

Chris Wells
Vice President, HR and IT

We have found LSA to be highly responsive to meeting our unique needs in learning and development. Their passion for high levels of business relevancy, customer satisfaction, and quality align very closely with our core values and talent management strategy.

Kudos to LSA Global. They delivered exactly what I wanted under ever-changing conditions.

Laura McHugh
Director of Training and Organizational Development

Congratulations on your pro-activity in establishing this program and developing such an effective New Employee Orientation course.

Farhat Ali
President and Chief Executive Office

LSA has a very unique and powerful methodology regarding learning. Their ability to overcome skepticism, obtain executive support, and create an aligned learning strategy that provides measurable business impact is second to none.

They understand your goals, flex to your needs, and solve problems. They certainly help make my job easier and are a pleasure to work with.

I highly recommend LSA to anyone trying to connect the dots between strategy, skills, knowledge, and results.

Noelle Van Vlierbergen
Human Resources Director

We have partnered with LSA for years. Our organization’s learning needs have increased, decreased, and increased again over time.

The beauty of LSA’s business model is its flexibility and depth of their expertise.

When we need strategic or tactical outside help that we can trust, we use LSA knowing that we can depend on outstanding quality advice and targeted solutions every time. You cannot go wrong with LSA.

Margie Bunting
HR Manager

LSA helped us to create the strategic clarity and alignment we needed for our team to thrive.

The practical, no-nonsense, and outcome-oriented approach really helped us all get on the same page and set us up to be a high performing leadership team to focus on what matters most.

Michael Carter
VP Human Resources

The quality of LSA’s Leadership Training Programs and facilitators is always top notch. We recognize and appreciate the hard work LSA always goes through to align to our unique culture and meet our specific requirements. Thank you for regularly going above and beyond. Your support and dedication, both on the strategic and tactical side, have been outstanding!

Anna Meyer
Leadership Development

Thank you! Your learning strategy insights flipped our approach from a content-driven design to one where business strategy and relevancy drives the leadership programs we aimed to redesign.

This investment more than proved its worth – not only did it improve our leadership development program redesign, but it also was like a mini executive seminar that stretched our experienced L&D team’s thinking.

Richard Morse
Senior Director Talent Management