5 Must-Haves and Needs Assessment Questions for L&D Success

Navigating training requests without a needs assessment can feel like steering a ship through heavy fog. Fortunately, creating a focused strategy can help learning and development professionals land on the true business needs before diving into creating training programs.

But crafting an effective needs assessment is hard when time is tight, resources are thin, or you’re a department of one. Sound familiar?

For advice, I spoke with Kelly L. Jones and Jody N. Lumsden (video), authors of Needs Assessment on a Shoestring, a new book from ATD Press. During our discussion, they shared five key elements L&D pros require for a successful needs assessment strategy.

According to Lumsden, “Learning and development professionals really need to know what problem they're trying to solve.”

In their book, the authors explain that the problem is the reason for the needs assessment; it represents the issue, challenge, or opportunity to be solved. And they recommend working with stakeholders to identify and quantify the problem as early as possible to plan an effective needs assessment.

It’s also important to work on one problem at a time. If multiple problems are identified, collaborate with stakeholders to prioritize each problem.

When pressed for time, the book suggests using “cut to the chase” questions to quickly uncover the root of the problem. Here are a few questions the authors recommend asking stakeholders:

L&D professionals should also ask questions to help them understand how a specific problem affects the business. The book asserts that the business impact informs why the problem is worth solving. Be sure to clarify how this problem is affecting the business performance. This can also help you prioritize solution development.

“Understand where you are today and where you need to go,” reminds Lumsden. Being able to capture the current state and the goal state, which the authors define as “the future results of solving today’s problems,” can help you detect potential gaps, solutions, and timelines.

One way to understand the current state of the problem is to listen to stakeholders rationalize why they need a learning solution. Identifying and quantifying both the current state and goal state is necessary to develop recommendations and evaluate solutions for the needs assessment.

Jones and Lumsden note that stakeholders have a vested interest in the needs assessment because they’re the individuals who must solve the problem or they’re the folks who will feel the impact of your needs assessment’s outcome.

The authors believe that knowing all your stakeholders is critical to a successful needs assessment. Lumsden adds that this includes stakeholders who are “on the fringe” of the problem.

“The last thing you want is to uncover secret stakeholders and scope creep when you’re tight on resources,” they share.

The book also recommends categorizing stakeholders based on their level of investment, designating them as sponsors, key advisors, collaborators, or partners for clarity. Once L&D pros identify stakeholders, they can work together to determine scope, expectations, and available resources. This process helps address key questions and identify data requirements for conducting a comprehensive needs assessment.

For L&D pros, identifying the methodology they will use for the needs assessment often comes down to defining potential research questions.

According to Lumsden, “It sounds a bit academic, but you really need to know how in the world you’re going to get this information and where in the organization does it live? Who owns it?”

But to develop essential research questions, first identify the problem, understand its business impact, and know the current state and goal state, Jones and Lumsden advise in the book. Once this is complete, research questions can help define the strategies required for collecting and analyzing data and for setting the scope of the assessment survey.

Suppose you’re new to writing research questions or don’t have enough information. In that case, the authors recommend asking stakeholders to share the top three things they’d like to know about the problem you’re investigating.

For more on gathering insight through data analysis and putting forward effective solution recommendations, check out Needs Assessment on a Shoestring or the Needs Assessment Certificate.

The following is a practical, business-aligned set of needs assessment questions, organized by function. These are designed to uncover performance gaps, root causes, and learning implications—not just training requests. One helpful tip is to create an assessment survey with these questions. After the survey questions are answered, you can follow up with additional questions or assessment methods to deepen understanding of the organization’s needs.

Needs Assessment on a Shoestring offers talent development professionals a process for addressing organizational needs and determining whether training is the solution. Needs assessment pros Kelly L. Jones and Jody N. Lumsden apply the Build-Borrow-Buy approach to provide guidance, quick tips, and shortcuts for investigating and uncovering everything you can about the organizational problem you need to solve.

With this book, you will learn to build a needs assessment strategy, gather insight through data analysis, and put forward effective solution recommendations. You’ll also pick up strategies for borrowing existing information, talent, and resources, and for making resource management decisions. Regardless of the scope of the project, the constraints of the business problem, or how you get the job done, the steps associated with needs assessments are flexible enough to scale up or down. This book will help you whether you’re new to needs assessments or have a lot of experience but now must conduct needs assessments with less time, support, or budget.

Kelly L. Jones, PhD, CPTD, is a researcher, leader, consultant, and problem solver with expertise in building solutions that help people and organizations learn. She has 20 years of experience in curriculum development, instructional design, needs assessments, learning technologies, and workplace training and development.

Jody N. Lumsden, EdD, is a consultant, speaker, and facilitator with expertise in developing and implementing strategy and data-driven performance metrics in the areas of adult and workplace learning, curriculum planning, change management, and leadership coaching. She has 17 years of professional experience as a talent development and graphic design practitioner.