THE ROLE OF THE TRAINING NEEDS ANALYSIS IN THE TRAINING PROCESS AND ITS RELATIONSHIP WIH THE PERFORMANCE OF THE EMPLOYEES

Abstract

Abstract: In today’s world of changes the organizations and employees are getting used to the post-covid workenvironment. They have to adapt to working from home and moving to the entirely online way of work or need togo back to the office and tackle with the changed work life that includes restrictions and new regulations. Theperformance of the employees becomes even more important than before and many of the bottlenecks within theorganizations are caused by lack of knowledge and skills and not the right attitude and behavior of the people.Companies do not have the resources to meet all their training needs and the analysis of these needs has becomevery important. The main objective of the study is to assess the importance of the training needs analysis (TNA) forthe entire training process and for the work of the employees. It also provides a comparison between the manager’sand the employee’s points of view in terms of the analysis of the training needs and the assessment of the trainingresults. TNA is the initial step of the training process in the organization. It is essential for the overall training andeducational strategy and has impact both on the company and on the individual. Training needs analysis is the datacollection behind the decision that the organization makes whether to perform a training and will it improve theperformance of the employees, will it be beneficial for the business, on one hand, and who should attend thistraining, on the other hand. The assessment of the training needs is a fundamental process to a useful and successfultraining program. This process for gathering data for the training needs in the company determines the gap in termsof skills and knowledge in the employees to perform current and future work in the best way and helps theorganization accomplish its objectives by ordering or developing the needed training program. The article includesdifferent definitions for TNA and gives the main characteristics of the process. It also describes the importance ofthe analysis for the preparation of the training program. For the purposes of the study, two surveys were conducted –one among manager and one among employees. They check the attitudes towards the TNA process and theevaluation of training which shows whether goals are actually reached. Training needs analysis is connected to theevaluation process, which the last step in the training process. According to the survey, most companies do notperform deep analysis of the training needs and evaluate the course results only on the first step of Kirkpatrick’straining evaluation model which is the reaction after the training. The results show that there is a positiverelationship between the design of the training program, the application of the content of the training and thebehavior of the employees in their work environment after the training. Since the training program is designed basedon the assessment of the training needs, the latter is of great importance for the skills, behavior and knowledge of theemployees after the course.