Needs Assessment and
Pretraining States
Conducting a thorough needs assessment be-fore training is designed and delivered helps set appropriate goals for training and ensure that trainees are ready to participate (Blanchard & Thacker 2007). However, there continues to be little theoretical or empirical work on needs assessment (Kraiger 2003). One excep-tion is a study by Baranzini et al. (2001), who developed and validated a needs assessment tool for the aviation maintenance industry. A second example of a theory-based approach to conducting a needs assessment is a study by Fowlkes et al. (2000), who evaluated an event-based knowledge-elicitation technique in which subject matter experts (SMEs) are asked about team situational awareness factors in re-sponse to a military helicopter operation. Re-sults showed that more experienced experts identified a richer database of cues and were more likely to identify response strategies, sup-porting the conclusion that using SMEs during a needs assessment maximizes the benefits of training. The finding that expertise affects the quality of needs assessment data is consistent with the conclusions of Morgeson & Campion (1997), who reported that the accuracy of job analysis data may be compromised by up to 16 different systematic sources of error. These include social influence and self-presentation influences and limitations in information pro-cessing (cf. Ford & Kraiger 1995). More em-pirical research is necessary to understand how the quality of training design and delivery is af-fected by systematic and random influences on the quality of needs assessment data.