76% of employees find a company when they have extra skills training for their staff. But before jumping on that learning program, you need to ask the right questions. That’s why we have training needs survey questions for employees.

In general, there are two types of training surveys:

• Pre-training surveys: Also known as training needs surveys or training needs analysis.
• Post-training surveys: Also called training evaluation surveys or training feedback forms.

This article will focus on the second type – training needs surveys. We will:

• Learn all about a training needs assessment.
• Go through training needs survey questions for employees – with a ready-to-use template.
• Understand how training needs assessments can be super-helpful for your organization.

What is a training needs assessment?

A training needs assessment is designed to find where an employee is at in terms of skills and competencies, and how far they are from the skill level that you expect from them.

The gap between these two is the training gap, and it’s your job to find out the training needs that exist within this gap.

Training Needs = Required competency – Current competency

So with a training needs questionnaire, your HR team can figure out those needs, and use this data to update their training programs – or adopt a new approach altogether. The end goal is to improve performance.

But wait, it’s not only about performance! Fun fact: according to Marketing91, there are fourteen situations that can make a training needs survey for employees absolutely necessary. These include:

• Succession planning
• Process implementations or improvements
• New technology or software
• Changes in the workforce
• Company restructuring

Training needs survey questions for employees: Examples

Here’s a sample training needs survey made with a SurveySparrow template.

Let’s go through the must-ask questions in this survey.

1. What is your current job role?

This question has three goals:

• To know who needs training.
• To understand the kind of training they need based on their job role.
• Figure out how many within that particular job role need training. One way to do this within SurveySparrow is by grouping and comparing responses by region or city.

Lastly, you can also determine the scope of the training – if it should be spread across the company, or if it should be for a specific region or team.

2. How long have you been working in this company?

From orientation training to diversity training, businesses do employee training programs based on their requirements.

But training needs can also change with every rung climbed on the career ladder. This question will help you infer what each type of employee might need. Here are some examples of training needs at various levels:

• Entry-level: Soft skills, IT and digital skills, collaboration, problem-solving, time-management.
• Mid-level: Leadership skills, personal development, cross-functional problem solving, delegation, conflict management.
• Senior-level: Brushing up on forgotten skills, change leadership, professional development, strategy leadership, mentoring/coaching.

3. Can you rank the languages below according to your proficiency level?

Multilingual employees don’t just communicate better. They also translate (no pun intended) into more clients.

Depending on the job roles, locations, and clientele, your employees will need to be good at languages other than English. So this training needs survey question is for measuring language skill gaps.

On the flip side, it also tells you the employee’s preferred language. This makes it so much easier to translate the study material – no second guessing.

PS: If multilingual staff are a priority, you can use the Group Rank question type to rank the employee’s language choices according to how proficient they are. In other words, your employees can sort their language choices as groups – like “Basic”, “Conversant” “Fluent”, “Clueless”, etc.

Group Rank Question Type from SurveySparrow on Vimeo.

4. Can you rate yourself on a scale of 1-5 in the given competencies?

This question lets your employees evaluate themselves for vital skills like communication, creativity, problem-solving etc. This can be done smoothly with SurveySparrow’s matrix grid question type. Also, you can follow up with the question below:

“Can you tell us the reason for your scores?”

Why? Because there could be plenty of reasons for poor performance – lack of training is just one of them.

5. How well are you performing in your current job role?

With this question, we can infer if the employee, with their current skill set, is a good fit for the job role. However, as we all know, perceptions do not always reflect reality!

So for a fuller picture, it’s good to cross-verify with 1:1 meetings with the employees – and their managers. Also, regular 360 degree feedback will give you a much bigger body of data to draw from.

#6. Please specify the areas of your job in which you would like to receive training or instruction.

Based on staff demands, you can choose an appropriate training method. There are plenty of options available nowadays, from traditional classroom learning, on-the-job training, to online learning tools like Coursera.

Moreover, if lots of employees are demanding training in the same areas, you might want to look at updating your current training resources. Often, employee demands can tell us the areas where we need to improve.

What are the benefits of training needs assessment?

While the performance benefits are obvious, training needs survey questions for employees can also lead to these outcomes:

• Collect data about an organizational need (in performance, processes, or knowledge) that can only be solved through training.
• Identify skill deficiencies specific to teams or individuals.
• Spot weaknesses in the available training material.
• Define the objective of the training program and how it will fix gaps in performance
• Customize the existing training programs according to the latest requirements.
• Find out if there could be other reasons that are slowing down an employee’s performance – like not having the right equipment or on-the-job guidance.
• Compare data across surveys by time period to uncover trends and changes in employee training needs.
• Identify the best times to conduct training programs.
• Create more accurate job profiles for recruitment.

Wrapping Up

As we discussed, these questions are a good starting point to understanding what your employees require in terms of training.

Moreover, here are a couple of tips to help you write more of your own:

• Use varied question types like poll-type, sliders, and voice notes to make the survey more interactive. This will bring in more responses.
• Additionally, if you’re planning on doing this long-term, use a survey tool that has a data dashboard. This will let you view data from multiple surveys in one place.

To find out more, drop us a line. We are just a chat away.

Parvathi Vijayamohan

Growth Marketer at SurveySparrow

Fledgling growth marketer. Cloud watcher. Aunty to a naughty beagle.