Identifying Employee Development Needs

Competency and productivity are essential for organizational success in the 21^st century. A key ingredient for such success is human capital, and investing in our human capital will be critical for organizational survival.

This is a globally competitive environment, marked by high velocity change. Successful businesses keep up by getting ahead of that change; they get ahead by growing and learning; and they grow and learn by investing in their work-force.

Throughout the world, organizations that are at the forefront of effectiveness and competitiveness constantly seek to:

Improve the productivity of their people
Identify their needs in terms of the gap between desired or required performance levels and current performance
Select the appropriate strategies for enhancing employee performance, focusing on results and continuous improvement, and motivating their workforce to higher levels of quality
Integrate human resources functions with new technology and capabilities
Evaluate the outcomes of performance enhancement strategies to determine if further analysis is required.

Although training, development, and other human resource services are critical to increasing competence, meeting the educational challenge is just part of the answer. An effective system must focus on the broader issues of improving performance by integrating human resource solutions with organizational needs and priorities.

When identifying employee training and development needs, it is important to use systems thinking. Systems thinking recognizes that everything is interrelated, and that an action or event in one part of the whole affects all of the other parts. A systems thinking perspective will ensure that individual employee development is aligned to an organization’s mission, corporate goals, and operational requirements. Systematically planned training and development will help an organization be successful in its mission. Successful training and development programs depend on systematic application of the process. Once the benefits of successful training are felt and shared by the organization and its employees, enthusiasm toward the process of learning and development can help to create a learning organization.