Needs assessment in practice

1. Competency Model are Useful forTraining and Development in
SeveralWays:
They identify behaviors needed for effective job performance.
They provide a tool for determining what skills are necessary to meet today’s
need.
They help determine what skills are needed at difficult career points.
They provide a framework for ongoing coaching and feedback to develop
employees for current and future roles.
They create a “road map” for identifying and developing employees who may be
candidates for managerial positions.
This helps integrate and align the company’s HR system and practices

2. Needs assessment in practice
KLA-Tenor supplies process controls and equipment to the semiconductor industry.
KLA-Tenor service engineers need to diagnose and repair its customers’ complex
machines that use advanced laser, optical, and robotic technologies.The engineers
need to main proficiency in their current skills as well as add new skills to keep pace
with new technology used in the company’s equipment.This is critical for KLA-Tencor
to quickly solve equipment problems, which, if unresolved, can result in millions of
dollars of lost revenue to its customers. Providing effective services is critical for the
company to keep current customers and develop new business. In fact, one of the
company’s values is “Indispensable” (the other values are “perseverance”, Drive to Be
Better”, “High PerformanceTeams”, and “Honest, Forthright, and Consistent”).

3. Needs assessment in practice
KLA-Tenor uses a skill management process (the Right People, Right Knowledge
process) to monitor its workplace skills and uses this information to change its training
programs.The process involves developing a task list, training on the task, practicing
on-the-job training to gain certification, and conducting a annual skills assessment.To
conduct the skills assessment, a survey was sent to all of KLA-Tenor’s more than one
thousand service engineers. For each task, the engineers were asked to rate their
capability of doing the task on a scale from “I don’t know how” to “I can teach it to
others”. Also they were asked to evaluate how frequently they performed the task from
“Never” to “More that two times per year”. Based on their responses, they were
assigned a training task. More than two hundred courses were created to train the
engineers.This helped to achieve a 95 percent completion rate within one year after
training was assigned.

4. Needs assessment in practice
The skills assessment data was also used to identify gaps in current training, resulting
in more than two thousand changes in courses and certification programs.The skills
assessment is done annually to ensure that service engineers keep up to date with
new technology and products.
This example illustrates aspects of the needs assessment process. First, training
viewed as critical for helping the company meet its strategic objectives. As a result,
resources and time were allocated for needs assessment and training. Second, the
needs assessment included a task or skill assessment that helped determine who
needed training and what task they needed to learn.Third, based on the needs
assessment, training programs were developed or changed to improve the identified
skill deficiencies.