Needs Assessment At EY : A Critical Step In Ensuring That Our People Have The Skills And Knowledge They Need To Be Successful

Virtual brainstorming is a good tool for identifying training needs because it uniquely identifies each individual's level of competency, knowledge, and skill. Consequently, it becomes quite easy to compare the identified competency level to the company's standard competency level. Moreover, virtual brainstorming brings about better ideas and a high level of satisfaction with regard to ideas (Malhotra, Majchrzak & Rosen, 2007). Nevertheless, EY can create employee focus groups to enable needs assessment in addition to virtual brainstorming. Focus groups ensure that employees engaged in guided discussions on specific topics and are used to improve employees' engagement ability (Redmond & Curtis, 2009). Focus groups would also be useful in helping the EY employees get to identify their strengths and weaknesses as well as identifying new ideas for doing some work. Since EY is a customer-oriented company, their employees need to become informed of the new and emerging trends in dealing with clients. Therefore, using focus groups would offer the opportunity to uncover new trends that can be used in serving clients and maximizing their level of satisfaction.

Focus groups would involve all employees of the company placed in various departments. Specifically, employees will get to identify their needs, talent, strengths, and weaknesses in their respective areas of specialization and compare it with others in other departments. Additionally, it would be prudent for the company to place different training needs in the order of their respective impact on business (Malhotra et al., 2007). Subsequently, they can prioritize working on needs that offer the highest amount of business impact. This ensures that the virtual brainstorming and the use of focus groups work in the company's best interest. This would also ensure that the company receives a much greater return of investing in a needs assessment. Virtual brainstorming offers an efficient platform for a needs assessment. Therefore, EY would need to incorporate the use of focus groups alongside the use of virtual brainstorming.

References

Malhotra, A., Majchrzak, A., & Rosen, B. (2007). Leading virtual teams.  Academy of Management perspectives ,  21 (1), 60-70. 

Redmond, R. A., & Curtis, E. A. (2009). Focus groups: principles and process.  Nurse researcher ,  16 (3).