Needs Assessment

™            Reynold Akison
                                               21st Century copywriting that works for you online and offline.
                              508 Canada Street / Ojai, California, USA 93023 / 805-640-7956

I have over 12 years experience writing and editing training and marketing materials for corporate clients, small businesses and individuals in a wide variety of formats.

Need help designing, editing or customizing your training materials? Need an interview or feature story for your newsletter or website?
Need an experienced writer to "ghost" your next white papers or your CEO’s annual letter to investors? Need a video or multimedia script in a hurry? Need copy for your website or corporate blog?

You’ll discover that I can exceed your expectations and turn around your project quickly with excellent results. I also offer non-profit 501c-3 organizations grant writing services.
Please use click on my Contact Me page link or call me at (805) 640-7956 to receive a FREE-No Obligation Project Estimate.

Designing and Building Training Materials
First Step – Needs Assessment

It’s always important to know the client’s training goals and hoped-for outcomes when starting a training design project. Before you can address possible outcomes through your training design and copy writing, you must begin by knowing the needs of your training audience. Needs assessment is the first step in designing and writing course materials.

Use Surveys & Interviews

As a training designer and copy writer, there are a number of ways you can approach need assessment. You can take the word of the training project manager or team (your client). You can create and conduct a written Q&A survey to the training’s prospective audience. Or you can conduct individual interviews with a representative sampling of the designated audience for the training, using your survey as the basic research tool.

You could choose any one of the above or a combination of all three. In many cases you’ll be forced to settle for the first approach because of time constraints. If you do, remember that not knowing enough about the training audience is one of the reasons training can fail to be effective.

What Were the Assumptions Behind the Questions?

That being said, if you are forced to rely solely on the training project manager and team needs assessment, ask them how they arrived at their conclusions. They may have used a survey, interviews, or some form of anecdotal evidence like customer service or marketing surveys or even third-party industry surveys.

Keep in mind that any survey is only as good as the questions asked. The old data entry rule “garbage in – garbage out” may apply. Survey questions are based on a set of assumptions. Knowing those assumptions and what’s behind them is always important.

Doing It Yourself

If you’re creating your own survey, make sure your questions are phrased to gather needs-applicable information. Trick questions, hard-to-understand questions and very broad questions on the order of – “Do you think you need training in this (fill-in the blank) area?” – probably won’t provide useable data.

Interviewing members of the potential training audience often provides unique answers you wouldn’t receive on a written survey. You might discover existing factors and attitudes that could work against the success of future training. But beware of gripe sessions and excessive negativity.