A TECHNOLOGY-BASED APPROACH TO TRAINING NEEDS ANALYSIS

This paper is based on a project which was funded under the EU DELTA r esearch initiative with participating partners from the UM, The Nether lands, Germany and Ireland. It describes the purpose, design and devel opment of a knowledge-based computer system that addresses Training Ne eds Analysis (TNA). The consortium of industrialists and academics des igned and built an innovative software tool which gives accurate and c onsistent advice regarding training requirements for an organisation's personnel. TO create this tool, knowledge engineers methodically inte rviewed and elicited knowledge from several experts in the domain of h uman training and development. The final system entailed representing the underlying knowledge structures and concepts of the training needs analysis process. The application was constructed to represent traini ng needs analysis decision making and the system and interface were bu ilt using Visual Baste. The final application has been critically eval uated by end-users at several test sites across Europe.