Analyze - Application Issues and Tips

You need the best information possible, but you won't always be able to get it:

• If you know the job holders who will be trained, and the outcome is important to their job performance, you must analyze the job by observing and interviewing the workers and their supervisors, if you can.

  Training is important to the success of the company and the job holders.

  Training has become an expected job entitlement. Workers expect to gain skills during their employment, and employers expect works to increase their value to the company during their tenure on the job.Training is often used as a component of a job performance system where the worker is held accountable for their job performance following the prescribed training.

  Under these circumstances, you must play fair to all parties concerned, the employers and the employees. You must target your training development to things that matter.

The best way to find out what matters on the job, is to go to where the work is performed and find out.

• If you are denied access to the job holders due to hazard or geographical difficulty, then try to access their job descriptions and manuals and seek out people who know about the job.

  Sometimes it is impossible to get to the job performer. In that case you must devise ways to determine what is important. Talk to past job holders, or people who do similar jobs. Convene a panel of experts. Read the procedural manual. Do as many of these things as you can. There is no substitute for talking to job holders, but you can get good quality information through other sources.

  Under no circumstances give up when you are told you canot speak directly to the job holders. You must get as much information as you can from other sources and devise methods to verify and validate that information.

• If you are denied access to the job performers and not given any budget for gathering alternative information from alternative sources, then you cannot guarantee that the training will produce any change in job performance. The training could end up being a waste of time.

  Sometimes you will come across the situation where you are asked to produce training without any analysis of the actual job performance.

  Sometimes this is reasonable. The training may be in general life skills, such a meditation or lateral thinking.

  Other times, the training process is being used to certify that someone has knowledge. It may happen when some new regulation is introduced and "training" is required for compliance. The need for haste in gaining "compliance" may be urging a generic "educational" approach without any true linking of the content to the actual job performance.

  Tread cautiously. Be sure that no one will be asked to perform differently on the job after their "education". If they will be, then insist on finding out how the new knowledge should be used on the job and devise some realistic possible job performance measurements.

• Sometimes there are no particular job tasks and no particular performance measures.

  This is often the case in generic skills training that is offered to the public. However, you will want most people who use the training to be able to exhibit the skill at the completion of the training or they won't be satisfied and recommend it to others.

  Therefore, you will still have to perform some form of analysis of practical usage of the generic skills so that you can define the tasks and performance measures associated with those generic skills.

  If this training is for new software, then seek out the functional design specifications, the businesss analaysts, the interface designers, the marketing staff and the systems testers who worked on the development team. They should be able to tell you what might comprise practical performance measures and what tasks might be performed when using the software.

  If the training if for a widely used software or a copycat version of such software, you can find actual users by contacting recruittment agencies, software user groups or sales representatives.

Analyze: Methodology | Risks | Application Tips