This isn't a trick question! The reason I ask is because I heard an interesting case study on how BP does this at the recent CIPD L&D Show in London. The approach is deceptively simple: ask employees about the daily challenges they face in their jobs (through focus groups) and use that to develop resources to help with those challenges. That's it.
The result of taking this approach was also interesting. For onboarding for example, the learning team took the feedback from newly recruited employees and used this to design a set of resources that sat in an onboarding area on the intranet. Content included checklists for what you need to do on day one, after a week and after a month. It also included video and infographics about how BP works. Not a course in sight. And all resources are no more than a page in length - so easy to digest.
The approach has been very successful and that success has been put down to asking employees about their challenges and designing resources for them. The head of online learning at BP made the point that the problem with doing a training needs analysis is that training is the answer. For BP, creating resources to help people do their job better has been the answer.
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There is something called the Training needs assessment method which is used in determining whether there is a need for training within the organization and if there is, what type of training will fill the needs of the requirements. Training needs assessment helps identify learning obstacles via employee surveys, interviews, observations, etc., which in turn are translated into a training need.
Conducting a training needs analysis before you begin putting together your training program is a crucial step for developing effective and making the best use of your production time.
Here's a Whatfix blog that describes the structure of how to go about figuring out training/ learning needs: https://buff.ly/3DvE3SV
The nice thing about this approach is that it focuses on the individuals and their challenges. So what will help them overcome these challenges isn't always going to be training, learning or any development solution. It could be something different like the ability to work flextime, hotdesk or not to hotdesk etc. I imagine their employee engagement has risen significantly as a result of this approach.
I very much like this approach Martin. I'm looking forward to seeing some replies to the question 'How do you identify the learning needs of your employees?'
It does seem deceptively simple, but the simple approaches often win. Talking to employees about what they really need to know to do their job and what would be helpful I think is crucial. Perhaps they're already talking about this. Maybe even creating their own resources. There are at least a couple of organisations that I can think of where individuals had created useful guides, resources, lists, references etc that they had then shared with others. Some of this was more useful than the material from the two-week company scheduled mandatory induction programme.
So are we tapping into what people really need to know or are our learning programmes filled with a top-down driven agenda of what we think people need to know?
In L&D particularly we have to be part of these conversations and this knowledge sharing. It helps us to understand the real knowledge people need to share and gives us clues as to the resources, tools and culture that is required to support this.