Needs Analysis

In this data-driven world, the need for goal-oriented analytics on people, processes, and roles is becoming ever more important.

Need analysis of people allows organizations to quickly find out who is non-compliant and in need of training and to make smarter hiring decisions, retain talent, create tailored learning strategies, and increase employee performance. The need analysis & decision-making task used to rely on managers’ instincts but, as these metrics become more vital, data science and machine learning have been leveraged to automate these outcomes and provide a more accurate representation.

With the emergence of many Learning & development players leading the charge on collecting such data, it is predictable that their learning platform is often held accountable for collecting, organizing, and providing deep insights on an organization’s people need analytics.

Learning platform providers offer various reporting features aimed at defining best practices for recruitment, learning, skill management and developing teams. But the next step for business analytics and people’s need analysis is to be combined to provide a complete picture of how a business is performing. This data helps organizations to then create, manage, and execute strategies based upon the business need and increase learning efficiency.

While many businesses may already have a strategy for their people analytics in place, it’s important to assess whether it is providing you value. Check out this eight-step process based upon the ‘The Eight Step Model’ to determine why you want to undertake this project in the first place, how it should be carried out, and what are the desired results:

Think-Why:

Linking the reason that you are assessing your people analytics to a business reason will give your project the best chance of success and make sure that you are measuring the correct components.

Predict:

As observant folks, we often have a good idea of what is negatively impacting our business, and this is your chance to test out your theory. Link your hypothesis to your ‘why’ to help from reaching conclusions based on data that can often result from chance instead of real-life situations.

Collect Data:

Find the most relevant data that can test your hypothesis and determine whether the quality of the data is sufficient to continue.

Analyze:

Apply stats and methodology to the data that you collect to test out your prediction and collect insights. (Without analyzing, you will never find trends!)

Insights:

Data and analysis would mean nothing without insights – this stops stakeholders from drawing their conclusions to fit any preconceptions that they may have.

Recommend:

Now that you have your data, analysis, and insights, it’s time for you to make recommendations to improve the business based upon these findings. Maybe you realize that you need more staff in a particular department, perhaps you discover that certain teams are missing training on specific subjects – this is where you can truly make a difference and use decision making.

Use your DATA:

As L&D pros, you have unique access to your workforce and can often see what senior stakeholders cannot – use the data that you collect to your advantage and support your ideas to make a real business impact.

Implement alter and evaluate:

Once the decision is made, make sure to keep track of what has happened in your organization because of these changes. Fortunately, not all of the work rests on your shoulders – learning technology systems such as GYRUS is taking an analytical approach to need analysis, guiding admins on what mix of data to draw from to understand what has gone right or wrong. For example, if headcount decreased in a line of business, why did it happen? There might have been restructuring, maybe the organization was hiring less experienced managers, and maybe they were spending less on learning and development. Platforms equipped with AI skill mapping will allow for admins to personalize the learning experience at scale with adaptive learning techniques, providing the right learning content to the right users to see results. A centralized analytics function that takes everything into account supports you in understanding the full picture and then taking the right actions.