Most training budgets are spent on courses somebody asked for. A needs analysis asks a different question first — what performance is missing, and is training even the thing that would fix it?
A training needs analysis — also called a training needs assessment — identifies the gap between what people can currently do and what the work requires, and decides which of those gaps training would actually close. The second half is the part usually skipped, and it is where most of the money is saved.
The pattern it replaces is familiar: somebody requests a course, the budget allows it, the course happens, and nothing measurable changes. That is not because the course was bad. It is because the underlying problem was a missing process, an unclear expectation or a broken tool, and training was applied to a problem it cannot solve.
Most performance gaps are not training gaps. The standard diagnostic is worth memorising: if the person could do it correctly with a gun to their head, it is not a skill problem — it is a process, expectation, motivation or tooling problem, and training will not fix any of those. Applying a course to a process failure is how organisations spend a budget and change nothing.
Decide the measure before the training, in the same terms as the original gap. Attendance and satisfaction scores measure whether people turned up and enjoyed it, which is not the question. Whether quotes now take a day, whether returns are processed correctly, whether the system is being used — that is the question, and it can only be answered if somebody wrote the baseline down first. Reviews and the surrounding performance conversation are covered in performance review.
Ettex Forms carries the assessment itself, so responses collect in one place instead of a mailbox, and Ettex Records holds the resulting gap list with owners and review dates. The grid of who is trained on what is training matrix, and the written instructions that often replace a course are standard operating procedure.
Being direct: this is not a learning management system. There is no course catalogue, no e-learning delivery, no completion tracking against modules and no certification management. If you are running formal training at scale, that is a real product category. What we hold is the analysis and the record.
A structured comparison of what people can currently do against what the work requires, plus a judgement about which gaps training would actually close.
Ask whether the person could do it correctly under maximum pressure. If yes, it is a process, expectation or tooling problem, and training will not change it.
As one input only. Self-rating consistently overstates confidence and understates gaps; pair it with observation of the actual work.
Against the original performance gap, with a baseline recorded before the training. Attendance and satisfaction scores answer a different and much less useful question.
Unstructured interviews predict job performance barely better than chance. Asking every candidate the same questions and scoring against a rubric is the single largest improvement available to a small employer.
The difference between a ticket resolved in one reply and one that takes four is almost always the first message. What you ask for at intake decides the whole exchange.
Most incident reports are written to close the file. The useful ones separate what happened from who is to blame — and organisations that cannot make that separation stop hearing about incidents at all.