Needs Analysis and its future direction
It is important to train the employees of the organization so that they can perform as per the needs of the organization and thereby, achieve the objectives of the organization. There are employees at different levels, and hence, even the training requirements will be different for each of the group and sub-groups of these employees. However, the Human Resource (HR) Department conducts a needs analysis in order to find out the training needs of the employees as well as the organization (Moore & Dutton, 1978). They will identify that, some of the employees need to be trained on the technical skill-set, while some of them will be required to learn the soft-skills abilities. Some of them will be required to learn the managerial skill-set, as they will be leading a team of certain group members.
However, looking into the future needs, it seems that, the organization will be expanding. Today, it is an age of globalization, and hence, even the organizations will be spreading into different nations. In addition, due to either horizontal or vertical expansion, the organization will be hiring employees with different skill-sets. But, they need to be trained for different functional purpose so that they can achieve respective objectives of the organization (Borman et al., 2003). In the near future, the needs analysis will play a major role for the HR Department, since it will help them to save a lot of resources for recruitment and training purposes.
How the changing nature of work may affect training and needs analysis?
The working requirements will definitely change, as some of the employees will be sent abroad. They will be required to work with people of different countries and different cultures. In addition, due to increase in the responsibilities, the managers and leaders of the department need to be trained accordingly. Hence, carrying out needs analysis for each of these employees will help the HR Department to plan the training sessions accordingly (Arthur et al., 2003). It will help them to prepare the blueprint for the entire training plan and respective sessions. Thus, the changing nature of work will itself arouse the need of needs analysis for the training purpose. The HR Department will thus need to focus upon the needs analysis in order to successfully implement all the training sessions for the different employees of the organization.
References
Moore, M. L., & Dutton, P. (1978). Training needs analysis: Review and critique. Academy of Management Review, 3(3), 532–542.
Borman, W. C., Ilgen, D. R., Klimoski, R. J, & Weiner, I. B. (2003). Handbook of psychology: Vol. 12. Industrial and organizational psychology. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Arthur, W., Bennett, W., Edens, P. S., & Bell, S. T. (2003). Effectiveness of training in organizations: A meta-analysis of design and evaluation features. Journal of Applied Psychology, 88(2), 234–245.
