When Your Needs Assessment Needs… a Needs Assessment If there’s one thing I’ve learned while working through this project, it’s that conducting a needs assessment in, even in theory, is difficult. It feels like trying to assemble IKEA furniture with half the instructions missing and three people insisting you’re holding the wrong Allen wrench. The biggest challenge for me was accepting that a needs assessment isn’t a magical diagnostic wand. It’s messy. Humans are messy. Everything is interconnected. Low morale bleeds into communication issues. Communication issues reinforce training gaps. Training gaps cause safety concerns. And all of it loops back into morale like a self-feeding performance ouroboros. Another surprising difficulty? The balance between what leadership thinks is happening and what employees *actually* experience. Trying to reconcile the two felt like translating between dialects no one admitted they were speaking. Leadership wanted to focus on equipment training....
From science teacher to instructional coach - designing learning that sticks!