Courses nobody asked for and everybody passes
The usual vendor’s catalog gets hired, people attend because it’s mandatory, and everyone passes the test. The operation, meanwhile, carries on exactly as it did before the course.
TNA: know what your people need to learn before spending on courses
Every year the same scene plays out in thousands of companies: HR sends a survey asking what courses everyone would like, gathers the answers into a table, and builds the annual plan from it. The budget gets spent, the courses get delivered, and in December nobody can say what changed. A training needs analysis —TNA, for short— does exactly the opposite: it tells you, with evidence, what is costing your operation money and which part of that can actually be fixed by teaching.
What is a training needs analysis?
A training needs analysis is the diagnosis a company runs to find out what its people need to learn and in what order it should be taught. It compares two things: what each role should know how to do for the operation to work, and what it actually does today. That distance between should and does is called a gap, and the TNA’s job is to find it, measure it and rank it by what it costs the company.
One thing is worth clearing up from the start, because it’s where the term gets most confused: a TNA is not a survey. A survey can be one of its sources — and usually is — but asking people what they’d like to learn measures interest, not need. They are different things and both matter: interest predicts who will finish the course, while need predicts what happens to the operation if nobody takes it.
The acronym gets used so much that its letters are sometimes forgotten, so it’s worth spelling out: Training Needs Analysis. And while we’re at it, another useful clarification: a TNA is not a bureaucratic requirement invented to fill in a labor-authority form, even though many companies treat it that way. It’s the tool that decides how an entire year’s training budget gets spent.
02 · WHY IT MATTERSSYMPTOM 1 SYMPTOM 2 SYMPTOM 3 SYMPTOM 4
What happens when you train without a diagnosis?
Nothing dramatic — and that’s exactly the problem: something expensive and silent happens, and nobody notices until someone in finance asks what the spending was for. These are the four symptoms we see over and over:
The loudest area takes the budget
Without a diagnosis, the money goes wherever there’s an insistent director — not where there’s an expensive gap, which often sits in a quiet area that got used to solving things badly.
Teaching what they already know
The most common waste and the most demoralizing: people with years in the craft sitting through an introductory course, losing a day of work and confirming that this company’s training isn’t serious.
Training what wasn’t a training problem
The classic: three customer service courses get delivered when the real problem is that the system takes forty seconds to load an account. No course fixes a slow tool.
How do you run a TNA that actually works?
With five steps, and none of them involves sending out a mass form. The logic is simple: first define what should happen, then look at what really happens, and finally rank the difference by money.
- What the business needsBefore talking about courses, we talk with leadership: what goals the company has this year, what’s holding it back, and what hurts enough to pay to fix. Without this conversation, everything else is opinion.
- What each role should knowThe real profile of each critical role gets built: what decisions it makes, what mistakes it can make and what each one costs. This step is done with the direct managers, who are the ones who know where the chain breaks.
- What happens in the operation todayThis is where you leave the office. We observe the real work, review the indicators that already exist —errors, rework, complaints, turnover, cycle times— and listen to the people who operate. Hard data keeps the diagnosis from being a collection of anecdotes.
- Separating what is training from what isn’tA gap can come from people not knowing, not being able to, or not wanting to — and only the first is solved by teaching. This filter —uncomfortable, because it sometimes points at the process or the leadership— is what keeps you from spending on courses that were doomed from the start.
- Prioritize and deliver the mapWhat remains gets ranked by impact and urgency and turned into a sequenced plan: what to tackle first, in what format, and which indicator should move when it works.
04 · THE SOURCESSOURCE 1 SOURCE 2 SOURCE 3 SOURCE 4 SOURCE 5
Where does the information for a good TNA come from?
From five different places, and the trick is crossing them: when a gap shows up in three independent sources, it stops being a suspicion and becomes a fact you can make a budget decision on.
The indicators you already have
Turnover, waste, rework, customer complaints, safety incidents, cycle times. Your company is already measuring where it hurts; almost nobody reads those numbers with training in mind.
The direct managers
They’re the ones who watch their people fail every day and carry the cost of correcting it. Interviewing them well is the richest source — and the one most often skipped for lack of time.
Observing the real work
Watching how a task is really done reveals enormous distances between the written procedure and what happens on the night shift — and that distance is usually the gap.
The people doing the work
Not by asking which course they want, but which part of their job makes them feel unsure, who they ask when they don’t know, and what they learned by getting it wrong.
What’s coming
A new plant, a system rollout, a regulation that changes, a product launch. Half of next year’s needs don’t exist yet — but they can already be seen.
What do we hand you when the TNA is done?
A document you can use, not one you file away. Concretely, this:
- The gap map by role — what each critical role needs to learn, with the evidence to back it so nobody has to take it on faith.
- The prioritization with its business case— what to tackle first and why, expressed in the indicator that should move and not in “it’s important for the culture.”
- The honest separation — what gets solved with training, what with process, what with tools and what with a leadership conversation.
- The format recommendation — what works best as an online course, what as guided practice and what as reference material for the moment of doubt.
- The phased plan — what to start with in the first quarter so you have a visible result before asking for more budget.
That map is, quite literally, the first step of the method we use to build complete corporate academies: without it, everything that follows —design, production, platform— gets built on assumptions.
06 · THE MISTAKESMISTAKE 1 MISTAKE 2 MISTAKE 3 MISTAKE 4
The mistakes that ruin a TNA
Confusing it with the annual paperwork
Filling in the form because regulation requires it and filing it away. The document exists, the decision was never made, and the budget gets spent the same as last year.
Asking only the managers
Managers see the symptoms, but the people operating know the causes. A diagnosis that never went down to the floor describes the problem from a distance — and from a distance everything looks like an attitude problem.
Diagnosing everything at once
Trying to cover all forty roles in the company produces an enormous document nobody executes. Better a deep diagnosis of the five roles that move the business.
Never looking at it again
A TNA from three years ago describes a company that no longer exists. It gets reviewed every year and updated every time an important process changes.
How much does it cost and when is it worth doing?
The cost depends on how many roles enter the diagnosis and how dispersed your workforce is, so it’s quoted by scope. What we can tell you up front is when it’s worth it: if you’re going to invest a serious amount in training this year, spending a fraction on knowing where to invest it is usually the most profitable decision of the whole project. And if the budget is so tight that you have to choose between diagnosing and training, it’s better to diagnose little and well — five roles in depth — than to spread the money blindly.
There’s a moment when the TNA stops being optional: when the company grows or changes enough that nobody holds the full picture in their head anymore. As long as the operations director knows from memory what each person is missing, you can live without a formal diagnosis; the moment you open a new site, a new shift or a new line, that memory stops being enough.
08 · WHAT’S NEXT
From diagnosis to academy
The TNA answers what to teach. What follows is answering how, and that’s where the rest of the process comes in: the instructional design of each course, the platform where it will live and the construction of the complete corporate academy. Each step leaves something reviewable before moving to the next, so you never have to approve blind.
If you want to see what the end of this road looks like, the case studies tell the story of finished projects and the portfolio lets you open real lessons and judge them yourself.
Frequently asked questions about the TNA
What is a TNA or training needs analysis?
It's the diagnosis a company runs to find out what its people need to learn and in what order. Done well, it doesn't ask what courses everyone wants: it compares what each role should know how to do against what it does today, and ranks that list by what costs the operation the most. The result isn't a list of topics but a plan with priorities and a business reason behind each one.
Is the “what courses would you like to take” survey useful?
It's useful for measuring interest, which is valuable data for adoption, but it's not enough to decide the budget. People ask for what they know and what sounds appealing, not necessarily what the operation needs — and since nobody raises their hand to request a course on the thing they're failing at, the most expensive gaps are usually the very ones that never show up in the survey. We use it as one source among several, never as the only one.
How long does a TNA take?
Two to four weeks for a mid-sized operation, depending on how many roles are included and how available the area managers are for interviews. If someone offers you a complete TNA in three days, what you'll get is the answered survey — which is not the same thing, even if it looks similar in the PDF.
What do we get at the end?
A prioritized learning map: which roles need what, in what order to tackle it, what gets solved with a course and what doesn't, and which operational indicator should move in each case. With that you can decide the year's budget — and defend it in front of leadership with numbers instead of intuitions.
What if the problem can't be solved with training?
We tell you, even if it leaves us without a project. A good share of what arrives disguised as a training need is really a badly designed process, a tool that doesn't work, or an incentive that rewards exactly the opposite of what's being asked — and no course fixes that. An honest diagnosis also keeps you from spending on training what a decision can fix.
Do you run the TNA even if we don't build the academy with you?
Yes. The diagnosis is delivered complete and it's yours: you can execute it with your internal team, with another vendor, or with us. We prefer the first conversation to be about what's good for you, not what's good for us — among other reasons because a badly made map ruins any academy that comes after it, ours included.
Before spending the year's budget, it's worth knowing on what
Tell us which area worries you and which indicators you have at hand. We'll tell you what the diagnosis would look like, how long it would take, and what you'd have in hand to decide the budget.