3 ways to improve your L&D needs analysis and drive organisational growth

by Kai Xin Koh | Nov 27, 2020 | Newsletter, Training newsletter

It’s the time of the year again when Learning and Development managers plan for the year ahead. Sending a survey to gather insights about the learning needs is a common practice, but exactly how useful would these insights be? Will the data collected help L&D managers strategise learning initiatives that can drive organisational value and performance? 

The answer lies in how your questions are crafted. In the article “Is your feedback form effective?”, we explored the importance of designing purposeful questions that can solicit insightful responses. We can take the same approach for the Employee Learning Needs Surveys by being clear on: 

1. The objectives behind the questions; and
2. The types of questions to ask to help you achieve your objectives.

There are three areas to consider for purposeful and actionable insights from your employees. These areas can potentially save you massive amounts of money from implementing learning solutions that don’t deliver outcomes.

1. Look beyond the “What” and understand the “Why”.

“What skills do you want to learn?” is a standard question. 

A generic question like this would typically generate generic responses such as “communication skills, presentation skills, facilitation skills”.  While the question helps to identify relevant programme topics, it doesn’t offer insights into how the suggested skills:

• are essential in enabling the learners’ to perform better at work; or
• can support them in career progression (upwards or sideways); or
• would help the teams or organisation excel.

Furthermore, the same responses may be given but with very different sets of motivations. 

Same-same, but different

For example, if both Sandy and Andrew indicate their interest to improve their presentation skills, without digging deeper into the “WHY” behind their responses, L&D managers may conclude that a presentation course is the solution. However, upon a closer look, Sandy and Andrew require different learning interventions to reach their desired outcome.

Sandy’s motivations and desires: 

• Feel more confident to voice out her ideas during meetings.
• Be perceived as competent and as a result, increase her chances of being selected for a leadership position. 

Andrew’s motivations and desires:

• Help customers understand complex concepts for the projects he handles, so they see the value of his recommendations. 
• Be trusted to manage bigger and more sophisticated projects.

Their learning objectives and outcomes are vastly different. Prescribing a generic presentation course to them doesn’t take into consideration their contextual needs and definitely won’t help them achieve their goals.

Here are a few follow-up questions you can include to remove ambiguity in responses: 

• Why is this skill important to you?
• Describe how this skill can enable you to excel at work
• Describe the (personal or work) challenges that this skill can help you to address 

Note: The word “Describe” prompts the surveyor to elaborate their responses. This allows you to capture more nuances.

2. Consider the most effective way to turn skills into results

Managers have to look beyond the process of learning to ensure that any solutions prescribed would be effective in achieving their goals. Learning is only the beginning. What gets your learners, teams, and organisation the results is the application of the skills, yet many learners struggle to apply what they’ve learnt. 

There are times when programmes are well-run and well-received but soon after the programme, learners revert to the default. This is as though the training didn’t take place at all! 

It is not the learners’ fault

One may reason that the learners weren’t committed enough to apply learnings but from our findings, most reasons are beyond the learners’ control. Two classic examples are:

Example 1: Lack of alignment

“My direct boss isn’t aligned to the best practices of effective presentations. I couldn’t convince him, and he kept revising my work. So, I gave up. If only my boss attended this course!”

Example 2: Lack of opportunities

“I haven’t had the opportunity to present my ideas for the past 2 months. Hence, I can’t practise”

There are also times when the learning solutions were well-designed but learners felt that they weren’t useful in helping them achieve their goals. Rather than tackling these obstacles after the learning initiative has concluded, you can prevent them from surfacing.

Consider including these questions in your L&D needs survey to set your learners up for success: 

What have you tried to get better at X?

What worked and didn’t work?

If the employees have attended fundamental courses in the past, you can plan programmes to reinforce their existing knowledge rather than sending them for another similar course. You can also adopt elements that are effective and avoid pitfalls.

What are some reasons/potential reasons that are stopping you from getting better at X?

You may find that employees aren’t skilled in certain areas not because they aren’t interested to learn but because they struggle to find time to do so. If this is a common challenge across teams, L&D teams can consider micro-learning or speaking to team leads to dedicate a specific amount of time in a month to learning.

What needs to be considered in order to ensure skills can be applied at work?

This allows L&D teams to set up processes and involve relevant stakeholders who are critical to the success of the learning. These insights can also help training partners take into account the organisation’s contextual requirements to customise programmes and materials.

What would be the most effective way for you to get better at X?

Give a score for the following so that they add up to 100.

1. 1. On-the-job coaching by an expert
   2. Mentoring from boss  
   3. Learning from peers 
   4. Teaching peers 
   5. Project-based learning 
   6. Structured classroom learning
   7. Micro-learning
   8. Others

Notes: You may list a few options for learners to choose from but always leave room for alternative suggestion(s) to unearth new possibilities.   

3. Positive framing of questions

While one of the objectives for the Learning Needs Analysis is to unearth competency gaps, we have to be careful around using words with negative connotations. “Gaps” is one such word. 

This is especially so when a survey form isn’t kept anonymous. One may hesitate to provide honest feedback to HR or L&D teams with the fear that it may affect their work appraisal. Would revealing more gaps create a perception that they are incompetent? Competent people have little to improve, isn’t it? 

To tackle these, you can:

Avoid questions such as: “What would you like to improve?”

This can make learners feel that they are lacking in something and deter them from being transparent about their gaps for fear it may affect their performance appraisal. 

Instead, use questions such as “What skills would help you excel even more at your current job?”

This is empowering as we are looking for ways to support them and help them to shine even brighter. This may allow you to uncover performance goals that aren’t on the standard list, m e.g. Productivity.  

Parting thoughts:

With these considerations, you will be able to cover both breadth and depth in your survey of learning needs. 

Most importantly, purposeful and thoughtfully crafted questions will offer you valuable insights to guide you in designing an L&D initiative that delivers results. 

After all, money spent on learning solutions that aren’t outcome-driven becomes an expense rather than an investment to the organisation. 

P.S: Yes, you might be doubling the length of your survey and having employees spend more time completing it. But if we look at the bigger picture, what’s 10 more minutes as compared to many hours of training that doesn’t work? 

Photo credits: @stories via Freepik.com

Drive organisational performance with L&D initiatives

by Kai Xin Koh | Oct 5, 2020 | Newsletter, Training newsletter | 0 comments

In this newsletter, I’d like to forward some strategies advocated by notable game changers on how to keep business outcomes in sight with their learning and development initiatives. I’ve also embedded links to free and available resources that you can leverage to drive business impact to your organisation.

September Insights

Click on the Menu:

1. How mature is your learning strategy?

2. The difference between learning objectives and performance outcomes

3. Must listen L&D podcast to drive performance 
And key actionable insights

4. Free Piktochart Business Storyteller Summit

1.Learning Strategy Maturity Model


Without a strong direct connection between business strategy and learning strategy, even the best learning experiences and content won’t be able to move the needle on outcomes.

The Brandon Hall Group broke down Learning Strategy into 4 different levels, with Level 4 being the most impactful to an organisation’s performance. Which one do you think your organisation falls under?

Companies found a blended approach of  learning together with an outcome specific learning measurement model helps them move up the maturity curve.

How can Learning Strategy be outcome specific?

1. Established the desired business outcomes
2. Define the knowledge, skills, and behaviours needed to help achieve those results.
3. Evaluate the most effective composition of formal and experiential learning to achieve the results.
4. Measure change in knowledge, skills, and behaviours  after the programme.

More on https://trainingmag.com/2-keys-successful-learning-strategy/

There are a lot of nuances when it comes to the different knowledge, skills, and behaviours that a talent has to possess in order to drive performance in his or her job function. Thankfully, the Skills Framework developed by SkillsFuture contains comprehensive breakdown of these elements in a form of critical tasks an individual must perform to be considered as competent. Due to the actionable nature of these critical task statements, they can be converted into learning outcomes in  a programme versus the typical passive learning objective such as “The programme will help learners to understand XYZ”.

2. The difference between objectives and outcomes

There are different levels to learning objectives that can be written in accordance to the Bloom’s Taxonomy framework. The lower level objectives are knowledge-based that concerns how the learners understand and remember. The highest level of learning is one that is actionable. Unfortunately, many of the learning objective statements are written in a manner that  focuses on the content/knowledge rather than the application and outcome.

1. Knowledge-based learning objectives guide the content to be covered in the training.
2. Learning outcomes guide the application of the new knowledge.
3. Performance outcomes allows L&D to measure the effectiveness of the training from a business strategy perspective.

Here’s a simple table that shows the difference between these 3 components:

3. My favourite L&D podcast and episodes about enabling performance with learning

Each episode by David James feels like a home run to me. Most times, it also feels like a boxing match whenever David passionately challenges the old in a no nonsense manner.

These are must listen episodes:
• Is L&D solving real problems?

• Performance focused, data-led and campaign driven L&D

• Performance Consulting


The key ideas covered in these episodes are mainly around how the L&D team should shift from being  training organisers to performance consultants. Without this shift, the L&D department will eventually be seen as irrelevant because:

• Team leads may feel that trading their team’s time for ineffective traditional workshops isn’t worthwhile. This is due to the operational disruption that comes with it.

• Self-directed employees are finding more effective learning avenues on their own outside of work.

• Learning clients may go direct to IT for learning tech solutions

• etc

These episodes offered these insights to becoming performance consultants:

1. Spend time, money, and effort on real problems rather than perceived problems

The following are not actual problems. 


• No one is using the LMS
• The company doesn’t have a conflict resolution training programme
• The company’s e-learning isn’t interactive enough.

Why? These are not problems for the people whom L&Ds are seeking to engage. An individual doesn’t care about whether e-learning is interactive as long as it can help them to do their job better.

2. Contextualise the L&D solutions

The developed solutions are often divorced from its original and actual need because they are taken out of context. When learning initiatives are designed based on aggregated common needs and are standardised in the name of scalability and cost-effectiveness, the performance outcomes are compromised. The moment we try to serve everyone with a single solution, we benefit no one.

Often the solution to the performance problem isn’t a full-day workshop or a new LMS system. Suggestion: Suspend any judgment on  how the solution might look like and seek to understand the underlying contextual problem.

3. Apply a campaign approach to learning (Case study Citi)

The adoption of a learning solution is very dependent on the learning culture (or lack thereof) within the organisation. Citibank has won multiple awards for its Learning & Development Strategy and this is largely attributed to its differentiated performance-driven approach. Led by Brian Murphy, Head of Learning and Leadership Development, the company applied a campaign approach to learning and saw massive results in these areas:

• Learning participation,
• Learning engagement
• Staff satisfaction levels,
• Sustained learning by staff

“Underpinning the change was a principle that Citi’s people, in whichever part of the firm they worked, deserved better than a menu of training course”

Citi launched #BeMore, a CEO sponsored, non-HR branded, multi-channel internal marketing campaign designed to empower people to take control of their own development. It uses social learning to educate and engage people while providing a central access point for all things learning across the region. Learning the team’s priorities have moved from designing and organising traditional programmes to supporting employee-owned learning experiences. The 70:20:10 learning approach consist of:

(a) 30-day development challenge: learners to undertake 30 micro actions (one per day).

(b) Employee stories: feature employees and leaders transformation

(c) Resource Centre and user generated content

(d) Ideas Jam: World Cafe format to gather insights and feedback about where employees want to be and learning can help them get there.

(e) Development Planning: Connect employees and line managers to create an individual development plan.

You may also download the full paper on the step-by-step approach that Citi took to develop award-winning agile learning solutions here: https://702010institute.com/project/11940

Reminder: If you’re a client of our Stories That Stick or Persuasive Presentations That Sell programme and hasn’t gained access to our free 30-day storytelling mastery email course, drop me an email to request access: [email protected]. 


4. Free access to Business Storyteller Summit by Piktochart

Speaking about 70:20:10 and informal learning, you and your teams shouldn’t miss this upcoming Storyteller Summit!

This November, Picktochart will be hosting a series of fireside chat and talks featuring storytelling experts from around the world. Many of them I admire such as Nancy Duarte and Andy Raskin and I feel privileged to be included in the line-up of speakers.

I’ll be chatting about “The secret behind writing irresistibly-persuasive pitches” with Agata Krzysztofik, Head of Marketing, at Piktochart. What are the performance outcomes you may ask? Answer: Get your ideas heard, win over tough audiences, and get the “yes” from stakeholders that you deserve.

This event is completely FREE. Click this link to reserve your spot now.