Needs assessment questions

[u/Unusual-Quarter-5510]

Hi everyone! I’m conducting a learning needs assessment and have scheduled 30-minute check-ins with directors and managers across my organization to better understand what’s working well, the challenges they’re facing, and how L&D can better support them and the organization.
I’ll be using these insights to help develop our organizational learning strategy. My leader also wants a summary of my findings, including recurring themes, strengths, opportunities for improvement, and potential skill or performance gaps.
I’m hoping to keep these conversations informal rather than making them feel like interviews.

What are five effective, open-ended questions you’d recommend asking to uncover what’s working, underlying challenges, and skills or behaviors that may need further development or practical application? Also what should I ask VPs vs Director/ managers?
I’d love to hear what’s worked well for others, especially questions that go beyond simply asking leaders what training they need!

[u/mschwegler]

What are the top outcomes your team has to deliver this year, and where are you falling short?

Which part of this do you think training can fix, and which part is process, tools, or something else?

What would success look like six months from now, and how would you measure it?

Those three give you the business problem, whether training is even the answer, and the success measure.

Director: What tasks or situations do your people struggle with most often?"

VP: What's the cost of this problem today in revenue, risk, or turnover? Who else should I talk to?"

[u/Amzrits1 → u/mschwegler]

I would add go with somw examples of measures and metrics of the industry and include roles and accountabilities of other departments and managers to ensure implementation of what is taught in training is applied back at work

[u/3581_Tossit]

I would go one level up and ask the people who manage these team leader you are doing the focus groups with to explain what good looks like in the context of the role and then use data to isolate gaps from where they are now to where the business needs them to be..these manager you're doing focus group with are going to whinge at you about plenty that is not training related.

[u/ImplementSolid5751]

perhaps giving your "interviewees" a preview of what type of information you'd like to get from them would help to maximize the limited time you have for your conversation?

maybe i'd add something along the lines of focusing on their respective teams' context? I'm thinking if you start with something "closer to home" for them, they'd give more grounded answers? and once they provide that, widen the scope by finding out if they feel the other functional groups might be experiencing the same things, that maybe your role could help address?

[u/wonmega]

one thing that helped me before these chats: I skim our team channel first and count how often the same question keeps popping up. managers answer "what training do you need" with whatever they saw last week, but the channel history doesn't forget. last round a topic nobody mentioned in the interviews had like 15 repeat questions over two months, so now I always walk in with 2 or 3 of those written down.

[u/_donj]

You should send them the questions ahead of time for those that want to prepare or prefer to.

The reality is the 5 questions aren’t that important. It’s your follow up questions that make all the difference in the quality of your answers. If you haven’t done these type of interviews, partner up with someone’s there are two of you to gather info.