Chapter 4 Needs Analysis, Effective Trainig – Systems , Strategies, and Practices by Blanchard, Nick and Thatcher, James

Case Analysis: Chapter 4 Needs Analysis, Effective Trainig – Systems , Strategies, and Practices by Blanchard, Nick and Thatcher, James.
            The chapter “Needs Analysis” discusses the needs analysis of a company in terms of the training or nontraining needs of the company, and the phase that completes the process of achieving this said analysis. This process starts from understanding the Actual Organizational Performance and the Expected Organizational Performance and its possible discrepancies which determines the need of training or a nontraining within the organization. The following are answers to the question in the chapter’s case study.
Do you agree with Fred’s choice? Why?

I do not agree with Fred’s choice for three reasons. First, the package that was chosen by Fred does not satisfy the training needs of the company. Since the company is in great need for alterations to its services, catering to specialized items and personalized services, it is suggested by the manager to train non-management employees in good customer relations skills. However, there are discrepancies to the package chosen by Fred as it does not satisfy the training needs. The package that was chosen caters customer satisfaction training for the sales clerks and not the exact training.
Second, the price of the package is not as reasonable as the second package. The alternative package clearly caters to the exact request of the manager which is customer service skills training as compared to the lack thereof of Fred’s chosen package. It can be further reviewed that the second package pledges that it is the best in the country; therefore there should be clear indications that the Expected Organizational Performance can be achieved by undergoing this training. The significance, moreover, is that the price of the packages is much lesser than that of Fred’s chosen package.
Third, the duration of the package is not as advantageous compared to the second one. There is no assurance that the three-day training is indeed more accommodating than a one-day training. In addition, a much longer training does not help the company since labor from employees is suspended to accommodate the training.  Therefore, I do not agree with Fred’s choice because there is an absence of a thorough analysis on which training is more gainful and beneficial.
What else might Fred do before choosing a training package? Describe your approach in some detail.
            It is advisable that Fred study the organizational performance gap of the company before actually choosing the training package. Since it is a new vision that the managers are trying to employ within the company, there should be a study made analyzing the training needs of the employees. This should be done by taking into consideration the objectives of the company outlined by the new company strategy, the expected customer relations skills which bring about profit to the company, and the actual performance of the employees at the current time. This study would provide specific needs of the company from their employees that could be developed by the training.
            After analyzing all these, Fred could come up with a framework that will give a clear objective outline that is expected from the training of the employees. Also, with this analysis, Fred would easily identify which training package is more beneficial to both the employees and the company.
If training went ahead as indicated, how successful do you think it would be? Explain your answer using concepts from this chapter.
            With the concept of proactive training needs analysis, it should be clear that the managers made a right decision on training the employees to adjust the current practices to the new strategy of the company. However, if the success of the training is to be rated, I would personally give it a failing mark since Fred failed to do an organizational analysis, an operational analysis, and a person analysis.
            The organizational analysis further studies the organization’s objectives in its new strategy. Since there are no highlighted objectives, the training can be considered to be lacking of specific vision. Also, the absence of an operational analysis brings about an unproductive training since there is no expected performance cited by the management as to how customer relation skills should be in the company. Lastly, without Fred’s person analysis, one that studies the actual performance of the employees on customer relation skills, the training could not possibly cover all the needed trainings as current issues are not addressed. Moreover, there could be possible overlapping in the training as some acquired employee knowledge may repeatedly be imparted through the training modules. This, thus, brings about waste of time and money in the organization’s part.

Reference
Blanchard, N. & Thacker, J. (2006). Effective training: systems, strategies and practices. New Jersey: Prentice Hall.