What is a needs analysis?
A method to discover skill gaps and determine what training is needed to fill these gaps. This blog highlights key issues when determining how to pivot your clinic/gym to modern person-centered approaches. For instance –
Clinic:
- Passive to active care
- Active care to self-care
- Corrective exercises & motor control training to constraints-based motor learning
- Face to face to TeleHealth
Gym:
- Corrective exercise to general physical preparation (GPP)
- 1:1 to small group
- Face to face to online coaching
Maximize resources
Planning and developing rehab & training programs involves a lot of intellectual & skill capital. It takes an investment in both time & effort to ensure it’s not wasted on approaches which don’t match you’re unique gym/clinic environment. Doing a needs analysis gives you confidence that you’re investing in the most relevant training.
Fill rehab/training gaps
Gaps are precarious things. Any critical shortcomings make processes inefficient, hold progress back, & cost money. Examining your training needs plugs these gaps and saves you from potential weaknesses within your rehab/training. Examples include – identifying that you don’t have group exercise training for you’re gym or clinic. The solution is to upskill with someone like Darius Gilbert how to offer this in a way designed to engender high positive user experience outcomes.
Prioritize training
Based on the specialization of you’re clinic or gym, it’s likely that there a laundry list of courses that would be awesome to attend. But, you and your team can’t do it all straight away. Assessing the competencies & training needed points you in the direction of what courses & content are most important. You can rank what training should be done first and work on what you believe will deliver the most value to your clinic/gym patients and clients.
Bear in mind the role of generalist expertise. Stuart McMillan of Altis refers to this. “The more interactions we have with an athlete or team, the more ‘generalist’ we need to be with our knowledge.”
“You shall not limit yourself to the narrow confines of a specialized field of study. The broader your background, the better your ideas will be.”
– Tatsuo Iwazumi
How can you grow if what you gained mastery over is now outdated or if you’re field is disrupted by a Black Swan event like the COVID-19 pandemic?
From the Harvard Business Review,
“To succeed in this situation, you must learn and practice a new leadership style. Your old style of management, which I call “specialist management”, depended on expertise. You need to put that behind you and adopt a new style of management: the generalist style.”
A wonderful blog “The Generalized Specialist: How Shakespeare, Da Vinci, and Kepler Excelled” contrasts the pros & cons of being generalist vs specialist ultimately recommending for a rapidly changing world the upside of being a generalizing specialist.
“Any field you go into, from finance to engineering, requires some degree of specialization. Once you land a job, the process of specialization only amplifies. You become a specialist in certain aspects of the organization you work for.” Since change is the only constant how do you develop agile systems so you can adapt?
“If you can’t adapt, changes become threats instead of opportunities.”
As Michael Mauboussin writes in Think Twice:
“…people stuck in old habits of thinking are failing to use new means to gain insight into the problems they face”
Today we face the dilemma of information overload. Being a specialist is too narrow while being a generalist is too superficial.
“A generalizing specialist has a core competency which they know a lot about. At the same time, they are always learning and have a working knowledge of other areas.” Shakespeare, Da Vinci & Kepler are examples. They “…excelled by branching out from their core competencies. These men knew how to learn fast, picking up the key ideas and then returning to their specialties.”
Boost your chances of success by ranking your training needs
By assessing your training needs it improves your chances of achieving you’re goals. You can target & tailor your investment to what you actually want to achieve, thus increasing your chances of success.
From you’re Needs Analysis you should have a list of potential areas you’d like to upskill. You can’t do everything so prioritize for you’re market (patients & clients) what would give you the greatest ROI.
To Level Up
Successful training concentrates on the issues you identify in your needs analysis & focuses on lifting them up.
To figure out what’s holding you back from achieving your goals do a deep dive into the existing processes and practices that constitute you’re current way of doing thinks. In other words you’re “status quo” or “business as usual”.
Ask these questions –
- What are you doing at present to achieve your desired goals?
- What do you believe is hindering you?
- & what is needed to accomplish your goal?
The Needs Analysis is just the beginning
Ask yourself how will you measure you’re success? What are achievable objectives? The goal is to make the greatest impact on your ability to serve you’re patients & clients. Where can you get the most from the least?
