Not only do employee skills need to be assessed, but also the learning events, the resources, the organizations, and even the processes. Even the best training organizations struggle to understand the training needs of the organization. They fill out forms and hold mini-sessions with supervisory staff to explain the benefits of the process. The results are rarely ideal. Poor participation, poor quality of responses, conditioned responses, inertia, and the tendency to repeat what was done last year give organization development managers a poor basis to develop viable training programs.
Responses are usually in the form of courses or topics.
With an intellectual asset development system however, supervisory personnel are asked what skills their organization needs to reach their goals. And no one even needed to mention training during this process. Documenting training needs is an outcome of the system, not the result of it, thereby producing better results. Employee skills can be assessed by a variety of methods, some more accurately than others. The more common approach is through testing employees for job skills and knowledge.