Assignment 5: Environmental Scanning

Sarah Rooney

041068641

HRM 4123: Training and Development

Melissa Stock

February 28th, 2023

Introduction

After conducting two interviews with senior leaders responsible for training and development at

two different organizations, I was able to gain a much better understanding on the importance of a

needs assessment and strategic training and development plans that coordinate with the corporate

vision, mission and values. The overarching objective of these interviews was to understand what

different organizations do in terms of training and development – how do they figure out what

individuals, teams, or overarching organizational functions require training and how that training should

be planned out to help suit the overarching corporate vision, mission and goals? How do they decide

where to allocate resources for training and development? What do their current training programs look

like? These interviews are helping to solidify my understanding of how the needs assessment is the

foundation of all strategic training and development practices, and how certain organization’s fail or

succeed with surpassing the barriers to needs assessments.

Interview Questions

 How do you ensure that your training and development programs are strategically in alignment

with the corporate mission, vision, and goals?

 Does your organization conduct a needs assessment as the first step to new training and

development opportunities?

o If so, how do you conduct your needs assessment?

o What tools do you use?

o How does your needs assessment change between individuals, teams, or the

organization at large?

 What are the main barriers that your organization faces to getting a proper needs assessment?
  What do you do to ensure that you are minimizing the risk of these barriers?

o How effective have these efforts been so far?

Interview Summary

The first senior leader in training and development that I interviewed worked for a packaged

water company. This is a mid-sized organization that has two different plants located in Ontario. During

this interview, the leader mentioned that he was recently hired in this organization and one of the first

major projects that he has decided to focus on is improving the training and development program

within the organization. He mentioned that the organization currently has no strategic planning to their

training and development program – they provide the most basic online module training that takes

approximately 4-6 hours to complete, and is emailed to each employee when they begin their

employment at the organization. This training is specialized towards the bottled water industry, but it is

not specialized towards specific positions within the company. This means that there is no specialized

training for specific positions within the company, or any development opportunities for people within

the company to expand their knowledge or their skills. This senior leader found that the biggest barriers

that he found during his attempts to do a needs analysis is the lack of resources and skills. Due to the

fact that the current training and development program is run by someone who is an HR generalist and

does not have the specific required training to effectively manage a training and development program,

there is a lack of skills that are available to properly execute a needs assessment. Additionally, the

organization did not have the funding to properly execute a strategic training and development

program.

The second senior leader that I interviewed worked for a large-scale construction organization.

This organization has an excellent training and development program in which he mentioned that the
CEO provided full support and resources to create and maintain an effective training and development

program. The senior leader mentioned that the training and development program within their

organization is deeply embedded within their organizational mission, vision, and goals. The organization

has recently shifted towards larger “mega-projects” and away from smaller projects. The training and

development program followed in this shift and re-adjusted their program, which their first step of that

process was a needs assessment. They began to create global learning environments where they would

have all their senior leaders come in for specific training opportunities and mid-tier level learning

opportunities. Their training program began top down to ensure that each leader was able to have all of

the tools to effectively help with the training and development of their respective teams. This

organization uses a needs assessment for a multitude of things – they conduct them for specific projects

or tasks that managers, but also, they consistently conduct needs assessment from a future workforce

perspective to ensure that they are always thinking ahead. The senior leader mentioned that the most

difficult part of the needs assessment is that managers and project managers are sometimes not capable

of articulating exactly what they need their team to do – they sometimes come with a problem without

any solution or direction for the needs assessment.

Environmental Scan for Needs Analysis

It is evident that a needs analysis is extremely important when looking at new training and

development opportunities for an organization. There are many benefits that they add to the

preparation stage of training and development programs, but there are also many barriers that training,

and development leaders face when making a attempt for a needs assessment.

To begin, a needs assessment allows for managers to see where there are gaps in skills and

resources, and where more training and development opportunities are needed. It allows for managers
and team leaders to say that they are wanting to do project x, and need x skills and finite resources to

do so. By conducting a needs assessment, managers and leaders are able to help enhance the

performance of an organization by creating the specific training required for specific projects and jobs to

ensure that each employee has the necessary skills and abilities to improve their performance.

Additionally, needs assessments help to create a skills inventory and gather important data that is

beneficial for future planning within the organization. A needs assessment helps to ensure that specific

training strategies are created, which helps to ensure the success of projects. After my discussions with

people in the training and development field, it became evident that a needs assessment is most helpful

for complex and specific issues and was very beneficial for exploring unexpected problems and their

associated solutions. Finally, a needs assessment helps organizations evaluate current performance to

ensure that future performance can be enhanced.

There are a multitude of barriers that leaders find when they are attempting to complete a

needs assessment. One of the biggest barriers that managers face is a lack of resources to complete

such assessment. Many organizations with a small training and development department do not have

the allocated resources to be able to conduct effective needs assessments and create valuable solutions

to current issues. For organizations who already struggle to find space in budgets for training and

development, it will be difficult to convince them to conduct a needs assessment because the process is

a direct cost without any immediate benefit to the employers (Stock, 2023). Finally, there is a large cost

and time associated with an effective needs assessment, that many managers and leaders will not be

willing to spend, managers often want training done immediately (Stock, 2023).
Recommendations for Each Senior Leader

My recommendation for the first senior leader that I spoke to would be to create a training and

development re-vamp plan for the organization. I think the leader first needs to create a presentation to

the other senior leaders in the organization that outlines the importance of a needs assessment and

more strategically developed training and development program, with estimations of budgets and time

that it would require, and who would be on this project team. By outlining the importance of an

effective training program to managers and leaders, and what the return on this investment would be,

they would be more likely to allocate resources to the training and development department

The second senior leader that I spoke to seems as though they have an extremely effective

training and development program that has support and resources from the senior leaders at the

organization. I would suggest to continue to do what they are doing in terms of needs assessments and

training and development program. I would urge them to continue to conduct future needs assessments

to ensure that they are continuing to stay on top and be the most productive and effective that they can

be.
References

Stock, M. (2023). “Module 4.” Algonquin College.