About ONAs

An organisational needs analysis (ONA) is an essential element of your employer engagement strategy.

You can’t do business without one . . . but what goes into it?

I’ve seen ONAs that are long, and I mean long. I suspect you have, too.

I’ve seen ONAs that have ensured that employers never get in touch with a training provider again. Yes, they won’t even speak to the provider on the telephone.

I’ve worked with lots of employers who see ONAs as bureaucratic form-filling activities.

You need to make sure your ONA is different. You need to make sure your ONA adds value to the employer.

Remember that the primary purpose of an ONA is to support the employer, not to give you lots of information to put into your database.

Therefore, you need to think about the answer to a simple question.

What do we need to know about an employer to enable us to tailor a support package which right for the people in his or her organisation?

That’s it. Simple.

In reality, providers get carried away and try to find out a great deal more. They take up lots of an employer’s time. At the end of the process the employer feels that he or she has lost an afternoon or a morning and gained nothing.

To avoid falling into that trap decide that whatever information you are collecting, it must only take you an hour at most to collect it.

Think also about ways in which you can make that meeting or discussion something that the employer will think is valuable. What useful information can you make sure you impart? What does the employer want to know more about? – No, this doesn’t refer to your offer. What is the employer struggling with, right now – and how can you help – without selling your offer?

Of course, you need to ensure you capture the usual information about names, addresses, contact details, web addresses and so on. There are other things, too, that you really need to know about.

These include:

how the organisation heard about you, the provider – because this will help to shape the discussion

the employer’s key challenges – because you don’t know how you can help until you know what is keeping the employer awake at night

how the employer is addressing those key challenges at the moment - because that will give you a hint as to where the gaps in the strategy are at the moment

what the employer aspires to achieve in the next year – because everything you eventually offer must support the employer’s own plans

how the employer currently develops his or her staff – because that will help you to be clear about what has already been done and what sort of development the organisation favours.

There are quite a few more things, but all of the information is gathered as part of a discussion. It doesn’t result from working through a checklist.

You can add value in an ONA discussion by actually giving the employer the chance to talk about these things. You can add value by asking questions that will help the employer to clarify and advance the thinking that has gone into current achievements.

Therefore, you need to spend some time working on your ONA. It can be a great selling aide and a reputation-building activity – if you plan it correctly.

Why do we need an ONA?

An organisational needs analysis (ONA) is an essential element of your employer engagement strategy.

You can’t do business without one.

You use your ONA to help you to find out what an employer’s key issues are.

An ONA is not concerned with training and what training an employer needs. It’s all about working out what is keeping an employer awake at night and where he or she feels the pain, right now.

An ONA deals with an employer’s business issues.

Whether you are dealing with public sector employers or with private sector employers, you need to know about the principal concerns of the organisations you are hoping to work with.

If you look at Part A of the TQS, you will see in A2.2 a requirement to find out about and to make sure you understand employers’ needs. The standard talks about “underlying business needs”.

This knowledge and understanding is important in the context of the Training Quality Standard, but it matters in the context of your business, too.

When you sell training commercially, you will need to link what you are offering to these underlying business needs. If you are going to stand a good chance of selling your product or service, you need to do this.

Therefore, today you need an ONA to help you to do business with employers.

Next time . . . what an ONA covers.

How much LMI do we need?

There’s an easy answer to this question . . .

. . . Less than you think.

You need information that you are going to use to shape your provision.

You don’t need great tomes of data that you will never use.

Why do we gather LMI anyway?
The main reason any business gathers and then uses LMI is to help it to spot business opportunities. That’s why you want to know about the size of markets and about trends in markets.

You use the information you gather to help you to decide where you are likely to be able to build your business.

You use it to help you to be clear about where you should be investing and growing your business.

LMI will help you to be more demand-led if you use your information in the right way.

What LMI do we really need?
You need to know about national developments – employment/unemployment rates - that sort of thing. You need to know what is happening in the industries and sectors that you are targeting.

You need to know if there is anything unusual about the part of the country in which you live. Is your area unusual in some way?

You also need LMI to help you to keep up to date with what is happening in your marketplace locally. This is an aspect of LMI that lots of providers ignore. Local information is best gathered by your own organisation. You can collect it with minimal effort. It's valuable because it helps you to shape what you do.

Every time you think about collecting and using LMI your first question should be: how are we going to use this?

If you don’t know the answer, ask another question. Do we really need to know about this?

What's all this about LMI?

Every one seems to want to know more about LMI and to gather more LMI. Therefore, I'll cover some of the basic LMI issues in the next post.

There is, however, a good question to start with.

What does LMI stand for?

• Is it labour market intelligence?
• Is it labour market information?
• Does it matter?

I tend to think of LMI as being about intelligence.

There is a hierarchy of importance in this field

Data is the raw material of your investigation. The individual evaluation forms that you collect in at the end of a training programme contain data.

Information is created when you analyse that data

Your analyses are interesting, but you create intelligence when you use the information to help you to decide what to do next. You create intelligence when you do more than just analyse data.

You analyse the forms that you collected at the end of that training programme. In doing that you have created management information.

You then decide what actions your analysis suggests. It is that activity that leads to the creation of intelligence.

Thus, information has less value than intelligence. It’s an intermediate output.

Unfortunately there is a lot of labour market information around and not enough labour market intelligence.

Don’t be satisfied with Labour market information. Insist of being presented with labour market intelligence.