What do you feel are your personal strengths and weaknesses related to conducting needs assessments? How can you leverage your strengths to advantage?

Conducting a needs assessment was a difficult task. My strength and weakness often were one in the same. My analytical skills allowed me to review content and make immediate assessments. However, this often takes me beyond the scope of the objectives and maintaining focus was difficult. Furthermore, using the need assessment tools we learned about, was intended to help organize and identify the gaps and process issues, but I found them tedious, difficult to use, and confining.

This inability to focus often on one scope or maintain objectives is a great weakness for me. During a process, I recognize various factors in a system, which influences processes, whether they match the objectives of the needs analysis. The issue arises in the inability for me to understand the impact of the factors, as often one factor may have a butterfly effect, especially in working in a process with human behavior as component.

Conducting this exercise in needs assessment is much easier to conduct if it were the primary focus in a job. Doing this alongside, learning the topic and various techniques, along with class exercises, and being remote, provide much difficulty in gathering information. In all honesty, I feel I did not effectively explore all avenues in the needs assessment process. Reaching out to the new operations director, and the old operations direct, and doing a department wide survey would be most beneficial. The shear size of the Learning Design department poses a strategic difficulty in assessing improvements. The multiple number of Instructional Designer, and Instructional Production Specialist poses an issue of how the matrix organization of projects and job performance of the individuals affect the efficiency of the whole organization. Furthermore, adding the third party tools, various technologies, and the level of proficiency the large number of Learning Design employees, this becomes an issue of proper assessment.

In actuality, working alongside, the culmination of conversations, and reviewing the documentation, can only provide an intuitive assessment based on knowledge collect. As a learning exercise, this helped me understand the level of difficulty conducting and providing evidence for an organization’s needs and growth are to conduct.

1. Process Management: A research graduate assistant is working and learning in an apprenticeship manner. However, often one does not learn the various aspects or roles of managing a research project. Such as RFP, financing, grant writing, efficient systems for collaborating citation resources.
2. Technologies: Various technologies are not used, but taught for different research projects. Qualitative programs to make work efficient are not taught formally. These are items that are learned on the project, in addition to experiencing the research group and process for the first time.
3. Leadership roles: This process of assigning roles is often not systematically approached or explored research groups. The group often forms organically from class interactions. However, issues occur in assigned groups. This is where assigning tasks or roles may be beneficial, especially with those who have strong personalities or competitive tendencies.