Needs Assessment and Benchmarking

Sentinel can carry out an objective skills assessment on your organisation and team to ensure you are focusing your investment on the right priority needs.

Training can be expensive – both in terms of time and cost. Our clients want to ensure that they are focusing on skills training that will generate the greatest return on finite resources and so getting clarity on priority needs is essential.

Sentinel can help you get to those needs; our intensive needs assessment process is a systematic but flexible approach for identifying general and specific role competencies and addressing the skill gaps between where your team currently are and where you want them to be; either to correct an immediate deficiency or to ‘raise the bar’ and stretch them further.
We use our findings to clarify the priorities and identify appropriate and feasible interventions or solutions.

Our needs assessment process includes all or some of the following elements;

Clarity over where you want to be

• Development or use of an existing Vision for the Organisation to reflect a new way of working or to respond to changed market conditions
• Establishment and/or refinement of core skill competencies by level and role
• Development of new job role specifications

Clarity over where you are now

• A calibration exercise involving
  • Existing data points such as Employee engagement survey outputs or Customer/Client feedback (e.g. Advantage Group Survey)
  • Quantitative and Qualitative inputs such as surveys skills interviews and assessments of a representative cross section of you and your team as well as a SWOT analysis
  • Getting an external view through skilled interviews of key personnel within customers to understand their needs, and who successfully addresses them
• Organisational Benchmarking; Sentinel can give insight as to where your organisational sits against a set of skill competencies versus our other (non-identified) clients operating within a similar industry or sector group (e.g. Financial Services, FMCG, Pharmaceuticals). This allows an organisation to challenge itself as to whether it is being ambitious enough in its vision and expectations

Identify the Priority Needs

• Outline the needs that have been identified, prioritise them and the organisational impact that will result from addressing them
• These needs may not just be training but also include other areas such as recruitment, support, coaching, culture and internal decision making

Solution Development and Implementation

• Develop pragmatic and appropriate tailored solutions that drive against the priority needs along with an actionable implementation plan
• These solutions may involve skills training workshops and seminars

On-going Measurement

• Sentinel track the progress made by individuals and your organisation against any training implemented, course correcting where required

The process need not be onerous or disruptive and can be adapted to your particular situation. We recognise that external involvement can sometimes unsettle an organisation, but we handle the process in a skilled, inclusive and open way that encourages support for change and minimises internal time involved. Although a process, it is flexible to reflect our client’s particular needs. We build on any existing ‘knowns’ and take a pragmatic approach getting to the needs, allowing the management team’s instinct to be a valid input.

From a management point of view, the outputs can give deep and meaningful insight that can help give direction to an organisation’s skill needs for years to come as well ensuring that you are getting the greatest return on any investment made as the training design will respond to the need. It validates and/or augments the needs for training and establishes a foundation for post training evaluations to measure success. Finally, it can help identify any non-training issues that may be influencing performance.