Training Needs Analysis: Guide, Examples & Free Templates

Training programs are most effective when they solve real performance and skill gaps. A training needs analysis helps HR and L&D teams understand where gaps exist, who needs support, and which type of training will have the greatest business impact.

In this guide, we’ll walk through what a training needs analysis is, why it matters, the different levels of analysis, and how to conduct one in four steps. You’ll also find examples, key questions to ask, and free training needs analysis templates to help you get started.

Contents
What is a training needs analysis?
What is the purpose of conducting a training needs analysis?
How to conduct a training needs analysis in 4 steps
Training needs analysis examples
Training needs analysis templates [free download]
Training needs analysis questions
What to include in a training needs analysis report
Best practices for conducting a training needs analysis
FAQ

What is a training needs analysis?

Training needs analysis (TNA) is a process for identifying gaps between actual and desired knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs) for a job. 

The need for such analysis usually arises due to an organizational problem. It can be a lower-than-expected quarter for the sales team, changing technology threatening the continuity of train operators, or consistently low customer satisfaction scores forcing the product team to be more agile and customer-focused. In all these instances, the problems can potentially be resolved through training.

In other words, when a lack of knowledge, skills, or abilities causes the problem, conducting a training needs analysis and subsequent training can be a viable solution.

Conversely, a training needs analysis won’t be effective if broader organizational issues are causing the problems. This may mean that, rather than a lack of knowledge, skills, or abilities, our diagnosis points to low sales due to a mismatch between the work and the rewards. Or that customer satisfaction is low because the top-down driven product strategy is not in line with what customers are looking for.

These problems cannot be solved through training (alone) but require organizational interventions.

An example we’ve run into is assertiveness training that a large county hospital was looking to purchase from a respected vendor. The problems were increased harassment incidents and medical errors caused by nurses not speaking up. The organization was looking to train these nurses on assertiveness.

During the intake, the trainer realized that the organizational culture was highly hierarchical and that people who did speak up were often fired or otherwise punished. The trainer refused to participate, explaining that the hospital first had to work on a culture where it was safe to speak up before training its staff. Doing it the other way around could have devastating consequences for the nurses.

Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities

KSAs refer to the knowledge, skills, and abilities that an employee must have to perform their responsibilities within their roles. They’re listed in the job description and guide candidates and employers to assess the person’s chance to succeed.

Training needs analysis levels

There are three levels of training needs analysis based on your organization’s goals and the knowledge and skills required to achieve them:

• Organizational level TNA: It determines training needs related to performance metrics, new employee knowledge at the company-wide level, and continuous training to optimize company performance and productivity to achieve its goals. It’s designed to address problems and weaknesses of the organization as well as to further improve the company’s current competencies and strengths. More importantly, it takes into account other factors like trends and changes in the economy, politics, technology, and demographics. 
• Group/job role level TNA: This type of analysis identifies the specific training needed to upskill a team, department, or business unit. It also determines which occupational groups experience skills gaps or discrepancies and how to address them.
• Individual-level TNA: Individual-level TNA focuses on an individual employee or specific employees within a team.
  . It is conducted in conjunction with a project or changes that could impact each team member. It is also used for an employee’s personal development for future career advancement.

Training needs analysis vs. training needs assessment

Training needs analysis and training needs assessment are often used interchangeably. In practice, a training needs assessment identifies the gap, while a training needs analysis looks deeper into why the gap exists and whether training is the right solution.

What is the purpose of conducting a training needs analysis?

The purpose of a training needs analysis is to identify and address knowledge and skills gaps in the workforce to achieve optimal performance. TNA also uncovers the reasons for the gaps and helps determine the approaches to removing them.

Moreover, training needs analysis helps in:

• Aligning training with business goals: This ensures you invest in training that helps your organization achieve its goals. Identifying your organization’s short- and long-term objectives and the skills needed to achieve them helps L&D professionals focus on the scope of the training. 
• Uncovering skills and performance gaps early on: Performance gaps occur, for instance, when a business is undergoing change or new technologies emerge. As such, employees need to constantly upskill to acclimate to these changes. TNA enables organizations to address these gaps before they become major issues. However, a PwC study found that only 40% of employers are upskilling their workers to address skills and labor shortages.
• Prioritizing training: A TNA will help you determine which training to prioritize based on time and budget. “Training needs analysis is critical if you want to ensure you don’t waste resources, time, and energy,” notes Emily Chipman, executive coach and principal consultant at Rushman Consulting Solutions. “When done correctly, people learn more quickly, there is a greater impact on job performance, and it reduces the frustration that comes for employees when taking on new roles and tasks, thereby impacting employee engagement.”
• Planning targeted training: You can create training plans that target exactly the skills and knowledge you identified as missing, so resources are invested properly.
• Determining who gets trained: With TNA, you can ensure that specific people receive the training they need. Customizing your training programs based on your employees’ needs maximizes their benefits.

Training needs analysis not only benefits the organization but also positively impacts employee experience. Karolina Kijowska, Head of People & Culture at technology startup PhotoAiD, explains that they conduct training needs analysis not only when a problem arises.

“We also go for it when employees ask for more growth opportunities because we want to offer them the best-tailored training. L&D programs based on training needs analysis helped our organization raise eNPS scores from 57 to 65 points. That’s because we provide employees with the training opportunities they asked for,” Kijowska points out.

How to conduct a training needs analysis in 4 steps

When conducting a training needs analysis, it is good practice to follow a standardized process.

We will go through each of the training needs analysis process steps using an example, explain the different elements to account for, and define what is needed to move forward to the next step. In our example, we will assume that a training solution can fulfill an organizational need.

Step 1: Defining organizational goals

As described earlier, a training needs analysis is usually triggered by an organizational symptom or pain point. Founder and innovation consultant Filip Moriau calls this “organizational stress.”

Usually, a (senior) manager comes to the L&D team with one of these symptoms and asks them how they can help to fix it. These problems can include:

• An organization losing its innovative lead
• A sales department struggling to increase market share for a fast-growing scale-up
• The board has come up with an organizational capability that every employee must develop.

The pain points often also relate to new opportunities that an organization wants to get ready for. According to Veena KV, Head of People Ops at FirstPrinciples, some examples are:

• Introducing new technology or processes that employees need to be trained on
• Trying to improve compliance or safety within the workplace
• Wanting to develop the skills of the organization’s workforce to prepare for future business opportunities or to stay competitive in the job market

All these challenges relate to organizational goals. If this is not the case, the challenges are usually not worth fixing. The manager is unlikely to approach L&D for a training solution. If the organizational goal is unclear, take your time to explore it. Exploring it will help you diagnose the problem and training needs.

When we talk about organizational goals or outcomes, we focus on measurements like:

• Financial performance
• Revenue
• Profit
• Return on Equity
• Return on Capital Employed
• Earning growth
• Share price.

Softer outcomes can include customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, and organizational culture.

Organizational goals and outcomes are hard to influence as the entire organization contributes to them. They are influenced by factors outside employee behavior, so it’s hard to improve them through training.

The best approach is to break the organizational goal down into a department or individual goal (we will do this later in this article), or focus on core competencies.

Core competencies are skills that all employees in an organization must possess. Most organizations have defined and specified what good performance on these competencies looks like. Everyone in the organization should have a basic level of proficiency in these competencies. There is consensus on these core capabilities, so defining their relevant job behaviors (step 2) is easy.

Before going to the next step, the L&D professional should examine if this organizational goal is attainable through appropriate job behaviors alone (step 2). Non-behavioral influences can also impact these goals, which should be addressed in tandem with the learning solution.

The training needs analysis process is highly similar for individual cases. Instead of an organizational goal, an individual or departmental goal is listed. The individual goal should be directly related to a departmental or organizational goal to maximize impact.

Step 2: Define relevant job behaviors

Let’s say we are an L&D professional working for a large consulting company. Currently, a small group of partners sells large-scale projects to clients. However, in the future, all consultants will be required to sell their services to (potential) clients. In other words, this will be a new core competency that everyone in the organization needs to develop. 

The next step is defining the appropriate job behaviors that will build this competency to help achieve the organizational goal. 

For consultants to sell their services, they need to build relationships, spot and explore opportunities, provide solutions, and seal the deal commercially. If we were to define these behaviors, they would look like the following.

Behaviors	Description
Build relationships	Able to effectively build and maintain relationships with a wide range of potential clients; staying top of mind.
Spot opportunities	Able to spot and effectively scope opportunities when they arise.
Turn opportunity into a deal	Specify how they can solve their problem through expertise and close the deal.

The next step is to break down these high-level behaviors into the skills and knowledge required to demonstrate them effectively.

When it comes to an individual job, you can conduct a job analysis to analyze job behaviors. The most-used approach here is the task inventory. For example, a receptionist has many duties, including hospitality duties. The tasks for this duty can be defined as follows.

Hospitality duty for a receptionist

Tasks	Frequency	Importance	Difficulty
Answering the intercom when the doorbell rings	300/day	Medium	Low
Welcoming guests and guiding them to the waiting room	120/day	Medium	Low
Providing guests with a drink	80/day	Low	Low
Answering questions from visitors	30/day	High	Medium
Managing expectations about waiting times	30/day	Medium	High
Receiving and handling complaints	6/day	High	Very high

The receptionist may have other duties as well, leading to a lengthy overview of various duties and their related tasks. Based on these tasks, the job analyst or L&D professional can assess the frequency, importance, and difficulty of each task. They collect this information by looking at the job description, talking to the manager, and employees. This job analysis provides input for steps 2 and 3 of the process.

Step 3: Define the required knowledge & skills

The relationship-building and commercial behaviors we have defined earlier need to be specified before we can move on to a training program. The more specific we can be about these behaviors, the easier it will be to create training programs that address these behavioral dimensions.

Behaviors	Description
Build relationships & spot opportunities	Required Skills S1. Actively reach out to create networking opportunities S2. Establish rapport by finding common ground S3. Adjust approach to accommodate variance in clients’ characteristics, needs, goals, and objectives S4. Ask the client about a preferred method to communicate (e.g., email, phone, WhatsApp, WeChat) S5. Staying top-of-mind and regularly checking for new opportunities. S6. Validate assumptions about the client’s financial status and purchasing readiness  S7. Leverage information related to the client’s decision-making process, organization structure, and profile of all individuals involved in the purchasing decision S8. Establish a follow-up communication schedule S9. Maintain relationships with key decision-makers and influencers Required knowledge K1. Client relationship management system/database  K2. Client’s social style (e.g., analytical, driver, expressive, amiable) K3. Emotional intelligence  K4. Importance of customer experience to build loyalty  K5. Question techniques and how to use them to extract client needs and build opportunities K6. Sales conversation techniques
Turn opportunity into a deal	Required skills S1. Identify buying signals S2. Sell using subject matter expertise S3. Ask the client for its business S4. Conduct process and identify areas to improve in future opportunities S5. Clarify objections to understand a root cause S6. Develop a timeline S7. Achieve consensus versus settling S8. Involve experienced seniors in closing complex deals Required knowledge K1. Closing techniques (e.g., assume close, close on minor points, overcome objection as a barrier to sale, offer an incentive to close, use last chance, ask for business directly) K2. Difference between closing with sale vs. securing the next steps in the sales process K3. Objection handling or resolution processes K4. Negotiation techniques K5. Influencing tactics

As you can see, we have combined three behaviors into two behavioral groups and defined the required skills and knowledge for each. We used a competency framework from the Canadian Professional Sales Association for the basic skills and knowledge elements, and adapted it for consultative sales.

To complete this framework, ask employees who already have these skills. Go back to the assignment-giver to check if these behaviors, skills, and knowledge will help achieve the organization’s goals. The employees can say to what degree the knowledge and skills accurately reflect the core competencies the organization needs.

The last step is to assess the organization’s current skills. Not everyone will need the same training. For example, the partners in the consulting firm already have extensive sales experience – they will not benefit from this training. A senior staff member will require different training than an associate or a junior. All these details must be considered before moving to the next stage.

For individual jobs, you can define the required knowledge & skills. This can be based on the task inventory and supplemented by other information sources.

Training needs analysis methods and techniques

You can use different methods, techniques, and tools to understand what skills employees need, what skills they already have, and where the gaps are. Common options include:

• Observations: Directly watching employees perform their duties to identify skills they possess, as well as gaps and areas for improvement.
• Questionnaires: Distributing structured surveys to employees to gather insights about their skills, perceived training needs and areas of interest.
• Interviews: Conducting one-on-one or group discussions with employees to explore their training needs, challenges, and suggestions for development opportunities.
• Assessments: Using tests or simulations to evaluate employees’ current skill levels and identify specific areas where training is needed.
• Skills audits and skills inventories: Reviewing the skills and qualifications currently available within the organization to identify strengths, gaps, and areas for development.
• Employee development plans: Identifying employees or groups with similar knowledge, skills, and ability needs.
• HRIS data mining and text mining CVs: Applying data and text mining techniques to HRIS data, resumes and CVs to uncover patterns, trends, and gaps in the workforce’s skills and qualifications.
• Text mining of job descriptions or job vacancy texts: Determining required competency levels per function.
• Job analysis: Breaking down jobs into their component tasks and determining the necessary skills and knowledge for each task.

Step 4: Develop training

The final step in the process is the training design. Here, you’ll communicate the needed learning outcomes you defined in step 3 to the training provider(s). You also determine a budget, scope the time investment for the training, and decide whether to work with internal or external trainers.

Remember to consider non-training alternatives that can help develop the required knowledge and skills. It can be the inclusion of these core competencies in the performance management review, praising and rewarding the defined behavior. Or you can also add them as selection criteria in the hiring process.  All these interventions will help build and reinforce the knowledge and skills.

The training phase is where you can apply the ADDIE model. The ADDIE model is arguably the best-known model of training design. ADDIE is an acronym for Analyze, Design, Develop, Implement, and Evaluate. Good training design involves going through all five stages.

The first stage, Analyze, is where the training needs analysis comes in. In this phase, you:

• Define instructional goals and their alignment with organizational goals
• Determine the target audience
• Recognize behavioral outcomes, and
• Identify learning constraints.

All these elements are addressed in the training needs analysis process you learned about in this article.

In the following stages, your team designs, develops, and implements learning programs. Finally, you evaluate their effectiveness. All these stages are much easier to do well once you complete the training needs analysis thoroughly.

Terry Traut, CEO of leadership development company Entelechy, emphasizes that at every step, it’s important to stay focused on improving performance, regardless of whether the ideal solution ultimately requires training.

“We may find that skills and knowledge are not the issue, or not the only issue. To increase performance, perhaps a simple job aid is required; sometimes it’s as simple as telling people what’s required; other times, perhaps employees would benefit from a mentoring or coaching program,” notes Traut.

Training needs analysis examples

Example 1: Email Marketing Executive example

Let’s have a look at a practical training needs analysis example for a specific role – Email Marketing Executive.

First, we need to define a goal. What should an employee in this role achieve? Then we examine job behaviors that will enable an employee to achieve this goal. Each behavior comprises specific knowledge, skills, and ability requirements.

Once you break down job behaviors into KSAs, you can assess the current level of each KSA within your organization or for a particular employee to determine the need for training. Finally, you can identify the appropriate training to develop the required knowledge, skills, or abilities.

This is what a training needs analysis could look like in practice:

Example 2: Organizational level training needs analysis example

Another example of a training needs analysis would be on an organizational level. Let’s consider a simple example of a training needs analysis (TNA) conducted at an organizational level for a company experiencing a decline in sales performance over the last quarter.

An analysis of sales data and employee feedback indicates that the sales team lacks advanced negotiation skills and up-to-date knowledge of the latest product features, which are critical for closing deals.

Goal:

• Increase quarterly sales performance by 15% to reverse the recent decline and improve overall revenue.

Job behaviors:

• Effective negotiation with clients to secure sales
• Accurate and persuasive presentation of product features and benefits

Skills and knowledge:

• Skills:
  • Advanced negotiation techniques, including how to overcome objections and close deals
  • Effective communication skills for presenting product features in a compelling way
• Knowledge:
  • Up-to-date information on the latest product features and how they compare to competitors
  • Understanding of customer needs and how the company’s products meet those needs

Training needs:

• The sales team requires training in advanced negotiation techniques and an in-depth product knowledge update, including competitive analysis.

Training recommendations:

• Organize a series of workshops on advanced negotiation skills led by an external expert
• Conduct product training sessions to update the team on the latest features, benefits, and competitive positioning

Example 3: Hiring Manager example

Steve Dion, Founder & CEO of a leadership consultancy company, Dion Leadership, shares a training needs analysis example from a client. The company was looking to implement interview training on their relatively new process. A training needs analysis revealed that the problem wasn’t that hiring managers didn’t know or understand the process.

“They too often ‘freestyled’ their approach to interviews to fit their comfort level, thus missing key points the process was designed to address, which resulted in poor hires,” says Dion. “The training solution we designed covered not only the mechanics of the process, but the ‘whys’ of each detail, the ‘unlearning’ of old habits, and the clarification of expectations and support.”

Training needs analysis templates

Get our free training needs analysis templates to structure your analysis and document your findings. The download includes an Excel version with a completed sample and a blank template, plus a Word version for writing up your findings and recommendations.

Sample training needs analysis Excel template

Use the Excel template to map goals, job behaviors, required skills and knowledge, current skill or knowledge levels, training needs, and recommendations. The completed sample shows how the template can be filled in for a specific role, while the blank version lets you apply the same structure to your own organization.

Sample Word training needs analysis template

Use the Word template if you prefer to summarize your analysis in a written format. It can help you document the context for the analysis, key skills and knowledge gaps, training needs, and recommended actions in a format that’s easy to share with stakeholders.

Training needs analysis questions

In each step of the training needs analysis process, you can ask specific questions that will help you conduct the assessment in an effective way. You can use these questions in manager interviews, employee surveys, focus groups, or a training needs analysis questionnaire.

Step 1. Define organizational goals

Use these questions to clarify the business problem, desired outcome, and whether the issue can be addressed through training:

• What problem or opportunity is the organization trying to address?
• What is the organization trying to achieve?
• Which organizational goals require a change in employee behavior?
• Which team, department, or individual performance goals need to improve?
• What skills or behaviors are needed to reach these goals?
• Can the problem be solved through different or improved job behaviors?
• Are there non-training factors, such as processes, tools, culture, or incentives, contributing to the issue?

Step 2: Define relevant job behaviors

Use these questions to identify the behaviors employees need to demonstrate to support the goal:

• Which job behaviors contribute to the goals defined in step 1?
• If these behaviors improve, will they help the organization get closer to its goals?
• Do the required behaviors align with the organization’s core values?
• Which behaviors are currently missing, inconsistent, or ineffective?
• Which cultural cues reinforce undesirable behavior?
• What other workplace factors influence the current behavior?

Step 3: Define the required knowledge and skills

Use these questions to identify the knowledge, skills, and abilities employees need to perform the desired behaviors:

• Which skills are required to demonstrate the behaviors defined in step 2?
• Which knowledge components are required to demonstrate those behaviors?
• What abilities do employees need to apply this knowledge and these skills on the job?
• What is the current level of knowledge and skill in the target audience?
• What gaps exist between current and required capabilities?
• Once employees receive training, what could still prevent them from demonstrating the desired behaviors?

Step 4: Develop training

Use these questions to turn the findings into training recommendations and next steps:

• Is all the information required to start training design and development available?
• Which training methods are best suited to close the identified gaps?
• Who needs training, and at what level?
• Which training needs should be prioritized first?
• Are there non-training alternatives that could have a similar or stronger effect?
• How will the organization measure whether the training was successful?

What to include in a training needs analysis report

A training needs analysis report turns your findings into clear, practical recommendations. It helps HR, L&D teams, managers, and other stakeholders understand the problem, the skills or knowledge gaps behind it, and the best way to address them.

A simple training needs analysis report should include:

1. Business goal or performance issue: Explain the goal, challenge, or opportunity that triggered the analysis.
2. Target audience: Define the role, team, department, or employee group the analysis focuses on.
3. Data sources used: List the inputs you reviewed, such as interviews, surveys, observations, performance data, skills audits, HRIS data, or job analysis.
4. Required knowledge, skills, and abilities: Describe what employees need to know or do to perform the relevant job behaviors.
5. Current capability level: Summarize employees’ current knowledge and skill levels.
6. Identified gaps: Show the difference between current and required capabilities.
7. Training recommendations: Recommend learning activities that can help close the gaps.
8. Non-training recommendations: Include process, tool, management, or workload changes that may also improve performance.
9. Priority level: Explain which gaps to address first based on urgency, business impact, risk, and available resources.
10. Next steps: Outline what needs to happen next, such as designing the training, selecting a provider, setting timelines, or defining success metrics.

The report should make it easy for stakeholders to see why training is needed, who needs it, and what action to take next.

Best practices for conducting a training needs analysis

Here are six best practices we recommend applying when conducting a training needs analysis:

• Start with the desired outcome: Clarify the organizational, departmental, or individual outcome you want to improve before identifying training activities. Then work backward to determine which behaviors, skills, and knowledge employees need to achieve that outcome.
• Use multiple data sources: A strong training needs analysis should combine different types of evidence, such as performance data, manager input, employee feedback, observations, skills assessments, and HRIS data. This gives you a more accurate picture of the gap and helps avoid designing training based on assumptions or isolated feedback.
• Separate training needs from non-training issues: Not every performance gap is caused by a lack of knowledge or skills. Some issues may stem from unclear expectations, limited resources, poor processes, culture, incentives, or a lack of manager support. Before recommending training, assess whether learning is the right solution or whether other interventions are needed.
• Manage expectations: Training and training needs analysis require advanced stakeholder management. Stakeholders include employees, service users (or customers), educational providers who design and deliver the program, and internal sponsors who pay for the educational event. Ensuring that the training satisfies all groups is crucial for its success. In other words, when a manager thinks a communication training session will solve all their internal problems, you need to manage their expectations.
• Use an integrated approach: Research shows that training programs that place new skills in a broader job or organizational perspective and integrate them with other organizational processes and activities are more successful. This does not mean that you cannot focus your training on something specific, but you must place what people learn into an organizational perspective.
• Document findings and next steps: A training needs analysis should result in a clear summary of the performance issue, target audience, data sources, identified gaps, training recommendations, priorities, and next steps. Documenting the findings helps stakeholders understand why specific training solutions are recommended and how they connect to business goals.

Over to you

Training needs analysis helps you focus your learning efforts where they matter most. When done well, it ensures your training solves real performance gaps and supports business goals. It can also highlight critical skills your workforce needs to stay competitive.

That said, conducting a thorough TNA takes structure, the right data, and strong stakeholder alignment. Without it, you risk investing in training that doesn’t improve performance or deliver impact.

If you want to build this capability, AIHR’s Learning & Development Certificate Program can help. You’ll learn how to run effective training needs analyses, design targeted learning programs, and measure their business impact so your L&D efforts drive real results.

FAQ