Assignment Task
How to do needs assessment when you think you don’t have time
The software crash course
One of the most challenging assignments a training department can face is the out-of-the-blue announcement that a new product or service or system or software package is about to go online, and 15 gazillion people will have to be trained on it beginning next week. The urgency seems to negate any possibility of needs assessment. But does it?
Brethower recommends an approach that begins with a clear-eyed view of the situation: “All those people are going to be doing something specific with that soft- ware. And they most likely are using some other software to accomplish that same end right now. So the task isn’t to teach them their jobs or the new software from the ground up. It is a more manageable task: to help them convert what they’re doing to a new system.
Therefore, Brethower suggests, make the training a straightforward conversion exer- cise led by a seasoned instructor and a sub- ject matter expert. “If you operate like that, then you [the instructor] and the software expert are focused on converting them to the new system, not teaching everything there is to know about the new software,” he says. Along the way, he adds, you’ll learn what the troublesome learning areas are for the trainees, so you can keep improving the crash course in subsequent sessions. The more vital training becomes to an Winc organization’s success in the marketings to place.
Rapid analysis
Brethower, who contends that most per- formance-change projects are hurry-up a affairs, recommends an on-the-fly ap- proach to needs assessment that he calls rapid analysis. You must begin, he says, with the philosophy that the most effec- tive and efficient training is always that which is “just-in-time, just enough, and just for me.” The technique itself is to create a “rapid prototype” of a training t program, “evaluating and revising as you implement and learn more about the problems.
As an example, Brethower points to a project conducted by his wife, Karolyn t Smalley, formerly a manager of HRD with L a large direct-sales company in Michigan. “The senior account managers of her cor- poration wanted to be much wiser about the financial aspects of their business. write a critical analysis of it