What is a Training Needs Analysis?
A training needs analysis (TNA) is the comprehensive process of identifying gaps between current and required knowledge, skills, and abilities of an organization’s team members.
A complete TNA gives chief learning officers and training managers a structured way to connect business goals, job behaviors, and skill development so training investments produce measurable impact.
Normally conducted by the organization’s training department or a managed learning services provider, the assessment serves as an audit to determine which skills will need to be developed in order to improve specific products or services offered.
An effective TNA helps direct resources to areas of greatest demand, improve productivity, and support organizational mission goals by clarifying what needs to be done and why it is not happening now.
Why TNA Matters the Most for Enterprise Organizations
For medium-sized and enterprise organizations, training budgets are under pressure, and every development program must show clear business value.
A thoroughly conducted training needs analysis helps leaders align training with business goals, identify the right audience, prioritize high-impact capability gaps, and avoid broad learning initiatives that fail to address issues within the organization.
A strong TNA also gives L&D teams better direction when they design strategy and helps answer business and strategy decisions as a whole, including:
- Organizational needs: What skills and knowledge will help strengthen our organization’s goal
- Professional needs: Is our current workforce equipped to handle the needs of our organization’s future
- Competitive needs: Can we retain existing clients while gaining new business amid other providers in our market?
- Market needs: Do our skill sets for the services and products we provide meet our customers’ needs? Are we the best alternative in our market?
By implementing a fine-tuned TNA, training teams and L&D experts can eliminate redundant and wasteful training efforts that can potentially lead to wasted time and other costly training budget mistakes.
While your training strategy doesn’t have to be perfect now, a solid TNA helps ensure you’re on the right track towards delivering what your organization and, most importantly, your learners need most.
Just how important is it to start with a training needs assessment?
Let’s look at some key facts:
- 40% of companies say their learning strategy is aligned with business goals; however, most L&D teams don’t have a strategic link as to why they’re deploying a skills program over another.
- Among several corporate training trends post-2025, 39% of companies are expected to increase their upskilling initiatives by 2035, per D2L.
- AIHR found that 63% of skills gap will be the biggest barrier to organizational transformation and meeting in-demand skill sets to meet business objectives.
Maximize Your Training ROI with Instructor-Led Training
Every organization has a learning strategy catered to their training needs analysis, however nearly every L&D department is using the same tool to address different skills gaps and talent shortcomings. We speak with Michael Rochelle of the Brandon Hall Group to discuss how organizations today are modernizing learning delivery with ILT and what tools are in use to deliver engaging learning without lost efficiency.
The Three Levels of Training Needs Analysis
A comprehensive TNA works at three levels:
- Organizational
- Job Group and Department
- Individual
On an organizational level, training teams examine an issue with their product or service offerings that isn’t performing to the highest standard. In short, it asks if the company is missing or falling short on their products due to a lack of skills or a set of skills.
At the secondary level, the group or department analysis training managers must assess skills gaps within functions, teams, or occupational groups, especially when a department is underperforming or needs to support a new strategic direction.
Finally, at the tertiary level, the individual analysis assesses how well an employee is performing in relation to their job requirements and professional goals. It is at this stage that training specialists must assess both the hard skills needed to complete the job and the methodology of learning those skills, and develop the engagement protocol to develop the learning experience that will follow suit.
| TNA Level | Focus Area | Metric Examples | What It Tells You |
| Organizational | Business output to customers |
| The state of the organization’s productivity and profitability |
| Group or Department | Capability to fulfill business services and products |
| If the talent within the organization’s interdependent groups can provide the best service with their skills |
| Individual | Ability to complete departmental goals |
| If the group’s professionals are equipped, empowered, and trained to deliver what the department needs |
5 Simple Steps to Conduct Your Training Needs Analysis
There’s no one-size-fits-all way to execute a training needs analysis for any company, as the method can vary between organizations for a variety of reasons.
However, we’ve devised a simple framework that can help you and your training department get started on where you and your training team need to invest time and resources.
Using a five-step process that keeps the work practical and tied to business results, the ideal TNA process follows a step-by-step framework in developing a comprehensive training strategy:
- Define business objectives that are not met as a result of skills gaps or skills deficiencies
- Understand the knowledge and expertise needed to proficiently develop those skills in a workplace or customer-service setting.
- Compare, analyze, and identify which training solution is best to resolve the identified skills gap
- Deploy scalable employee training programs that teach the best practices for employing a given set of skill sets
- Perfect your training program based on learner performance data and real-time application of learned skills in the workplace.
1. Define Business Objectives
Defining your training needs starts with comprehensive data throughout the entire organization, the industry, and your target market. With informative data, you’ll be able to see the overview of where your organization stands and your L&D team can best respond. Key data includes collecting resources from:
- Interviews with employees and managers
- Surveys, questionnaires, and industry reports from marketing experts
- Performance observation of employees
- Skills audits and assessments
- Individual performance reviews
- Key training metrics
- Job analysis and task inventories
2. Understand Your Knowledge and Expertise Needs
Skills that earn revenue are not easy to master for any organization. As a training manager or chief learning officer, identifying the level of effort (LOE) required to master a skill for your organization will vary based on a variety of factors, including:
- Technical mastery: Does it require years of training to start, or can mastery start with several weeks?
- Willingness: Can your current talent pool become engaged and guided to learn the skills needed when time allows?
- Resourcing: Does your team have the technology and manpower to deliver a results-driven learning experience?
While pop culture says individuals need 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert, you’ll need to deliver a more efficient and effective method that works for everyone in the organization.
3. Identify the Right Training Solutions
As training professionals, we need to be cognizant of the fact that gaining knowledge does not equate to gaining skills.
Knowledge is focused on having learners understand important concepts and know why they’re important within an organization.
Skills are focused on applying learned knowledge to produce a tangible result that the business needs.
Most training teams have the solution to deliver knowledge to learners, but even in the learning age of AI and with numerous eLearning solutions on the market, most fall short of expectations when it comes to providing skills development.
4. Deploy Scalable Skills Development Programs
The modern employee training program for any enterprise organization has gone beyond onboarding with video introductions and virtual presentations.
Instead, skills programs have been purely focused on upskilling and reskilling initiatives that are designed to reach the greatest number of learners while using the least number of resources, all while producing the most training ROI.
5. Perfect Your Training Program Delivery
The best skills development programs are done in an agile fashion: plan, deliver, perfect, repeat. During and after your training program delivery, compare the data at Step 1 with the results of your assessment.
Begin to gauge areas where your training program could improve to further meet the initial goal stated by your TNA. Key things to discuss include:
- Was the instructor-to-learner ratio balanced to give full coverage to all learners in attendance?
- Were there learners who weren’t able to make a training session or enroll in a skills course?
- Did training sites have enough resources and equipment to ensure training went well?
- Are some learners excluded due to time zones or distance to a training site?
- Are there regulatory concerns about the quality of our training and skills delivery?
- Is the training up to our industry’s compliance standards?
Why Instructor-Led Training is the Ideal Training Strategy for Most TNA
Instructor-led training (ILT) may seem like an odd choice to meet most enterprise training needs in 2026; however, the opposite couldn’t be truer today.
Despite new eLearning technology implemented today, current training strategies are doing less than stellar compared to the tried-and-true irreplaceable F2F training model for upskilling.
42% of training managers routinely search for new LMS platforms or online training tools due to unmet expectations. Another 22% of CLOs are finding it difficult to implement AI training tools due to unpredictability and, so far, the unreliability of such tools.
While these figures are from recent years and are subject to change, there is overwhelming proof regarding the benefits of instructor-led training to satisfy practically every skills gap identified in your TNA.
In-demand skills in this new era of learning will require more expertise than the best AI agent available to your organization. Some skill sets that we find in the most training needs analysis in 2026 and beyond will include:
- Sales training and sales enablement training
- Business development strategy, like franchise training programs
- Leadership and managerial tactics
- Technical skills and capability
- Understanding of new industry technologies and tools
Such skills require the advantage of human interaction to provide critical feedback, guidance, and facilitated application to ensure the learned skills are ready to be used on-the-job.
When skills become perfected under ILT and even virtual instructor-led training, they have a higher capability of producing better results for business services and products.
Unlock the Potential of ILT and Streamlined Training Operations
What if your upskilling and reskilling training programs could run smoother, run more effectively, and deliver greater training ROI – without increasing headcount or budget? Top-performing L&D teams at companies like Dell and Wells Fargo are already doing it. Find out how in this guide by Brandon Hall Group™.
Leading and Lagging Metrics: Measuring the Success of your TNA Delivery
Measuring the success of your training needs assessment throughout the delivery of your learning strategy can be attained via quantitative and qualitative measures.
Whether you’re using concrete data or survey responses, two high-level metrics L&D teams can use are leading and lagging indicators.
Leading indicators show whether training is moving in the right direction early, while lagging indicators show whether those improvements eventually reach the business.
Strong leading indicators include:
- Participation rates during hands-on training exercises
- Simulation and scenario performance
- Positive correlation between organizational, departmental, and individual metrics
- Individual requests for feedback and guidance
- Increased use of new skills and learned knowledge on the job
Lagging indicators include:
- Productivity and output per employee
- Customer satisfaction and service quality scores
- Decreased revenue and sales
- Compliance and incident rates
- Retention in trained roles over 6–12 months
This distinction helps CLOs manage stakeholder expectations. Behavior change can often be seen shortly after delivery, while revenue, productivity, and quality improvements may take longer to appear.
Best Practices for Successful TNA Execution
Depending on the size of your organization, monitoring a successful rollout of a training needs analysis will require continuous monitoring and mastering your own team’s training operations.
Across multiple training programs across your organization, you’ll need to ensure that all stakeholders, from executives to the learners (employees), are satisfied with the quality of the learning experience.
A successful TNA execution answers the fundamental L&D question:
Is the training delivered capable of developing the necessary skills needed to do the job and benefit the organization?
1. Seamless Monitoring of Training Resources
We already explained how in-person training will provide the best opportunity to meet most TNAs that are focused on upskilling and reskilling.
With large organizations, this will require logistical precision of training resources for multiple ILT and vILT sessions that can potentially span across the globe.
Improving a system of spreadsheets and calendars can work in the short term, but when teams become too reliant on this method, they risk failing to meet the objectives as outlined by your training needs analysis.
Consider implementing a resource planning tool to help coordinate key deliverables as outlined in your training needs analysis, including:
- Trainer and instructor availability
- Available ILT and vILT sessions
- Training site and training room reservations
- Equipment and tools used during training
2. Data Analytics and Reporting
Measuring the before-and-after of your action plan will serve as your compass in improving your fulfillment of the goals outlined in your training needs analysis.
However, with terabytes of data for just a single training operation within an organization, even the most skilled learning department can become overwhelmed with performance metrics and output figures.
Consider implementing and integrating a data and reporting dashboard with your resourcing tool to help accurately measure the input and output of your training resources.
Even better, consider connecting your current platforms in your learning technology ecosystem to get a detailed view of how each training session is delivering results.
3. Cost Maintenance and Revenue Tracking
As training professionals delivering high-quality learning experiences, we want to ensure we get maximum ROI for our training budget.
Despite being the most effective training strategy, ILT and vILT are undoubtedly cost-intensive. Managing resource costs and payments to team members can be difficult to keep track of, even with the best accounting software available to L&D teams.
Integrating budget and cost tracking into your training needs delivery plan will be a non-negotiable to ensure you’re never overplanning expenses for one or multiple training programs.
Training Orchestra: The Platform to Plan, Deliver, and Optimize Your Learning Strategy
Delivering a successful learning strategy after a training needs analysis can feel like an impossible goal for today’s training providers and L&D departments.
With so many critical parts to success, one might think it can’t be accomplished. As the best training management software for large-scale ILT and vILT delivery, Training Orchestra enables teams to meet and exceed their enterprise learning needs.
With a full suite of integrated tools to equipped to manage multiple training programs and upskilling initiatives, we’re certain that your team can fill your skills gaps and meet your training requirements.
Ready to get started?
