In the authors' experience, many training needs analysis exercises are strongly oriented to one of the six training needs analysis methods listed here, or use one exclusively. For example, if clients hired us to design a training programme and provide policy manuals as the sole source of information for our training needs analysis exercise then this clearly would be a content training needs analysis exercise without the benefits of training needs analysis covering context, users, and work performed. The result of this limited training needs analysis approach would be a training course that was restricted to teaching what was in the organisation's policy manual with no opportunity to deal with participants' learning styles, the way the policies were used in the workplace, nor the politics of the topic. Yet the organisation will get what they wanted: a low budget programme. Where therefore is the training needs analysis to determine what is really needed?

On the other hand take a training needs analysis exercise based on a work training needs analysis exercise conducted in focus groups. The result would be a report that dealt almost exclusively with a high-level description of the work performed. Without a training needs analysis of the tools and documentation used on-the-job, a limited understanding of the flavour of the work and workplace would be gained and not much would be learnt about the context, or politics of the organisation and the culture in which learning was to be applied.

With training needs analysis like in most things you tend to get what you pay for.

The more training needs analysis can gather information about the context, users, work and the content of training, the better prepared one will be to draw solid conclusions from the training needs analysis of organisation requirements, existing capability, the change/learning gap and how best that gap can be closed. With answers to the 49 training needs analysis questions listed in this article's accompanying training needs analysis checklist one can develop a learning programme with confidence.