Your Chief Virtual Learning Architect

Learning to Performance

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Custom Design & Delivery

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Predictive Evaluation

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Enterprise Learning Strategy

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Dave Basarab Consulting has elevated the training experience, offering an end-to-end comprehensive approach that includes training strategy, instructional design, development, delivery , post program training transfer, and evaluation (via the unique Predictive Evaluation methodology). Virtual Chief Architect Dave Basarab has combined all of these individual training elements with his user-friendly, comprehensive Learning to Performance approach, which significantly increases companies' training ROI.

Why we are different

Innovation: Our primary focus is creating learning programs using a Learning to Performance approach.
Expertise: Dave offers the depth and breadth of his experience, including working internally at prestigious companies (Motorola, Ingersoll Rand and Pitney Bowes) as well as his knowledge and expertise as a highly-respected, sought-after consultant.
Partnership: Basarab collaborates with companies, serving as their own Chief Learning Officer whenever they need to plan, strategize, or implement training initiatives.

Training Services

Enterprise Learning Strategy

Enterprise Learning Strategy

At Dave Basarab Consulting, we're experts in creating Enterprise Learning Plans. We work with you to develop your company's learning strategy and direction.

Custom Design, Development, & Delivery

Custom Design, Development, & Delivery

Custom training is an effective way of developing the capability required to execute your strategy. We are a custom design house that creates programs specific to your business.

Learning Burst Development

Learning Burst Development

We can create and deliver your courses via our unique Learning Burst Method - keeping your employees at their jobs while receiving world-class training.

Predictive Evaluation

Predictive Evaluation

We predict the ROI for your courses and establish success gates. We then evaluate the course against the success gates to show value realized and continually improve results.

Leadership Development

Leadership Development

Turn-key virtual custom leadership development program that combines world-class leadership speakers/educators with post-event personalized coaching to provide you with a cadre of highly skilled leaders.

Predictive Evaluation

How to Conduct a Training Needs Analysis That Drives Adoption

Training succeeds when people can use it to solve a real problem at work. A training needs analysis therefore needs to look beyond requests for a course and identify the performance gap, its business impact, and the conditions that will help employees change their behaviour.

For Australian organisations, those conditions can vary significantly. A mining team in Perth, a customer service group in Melbourne and a distributed health workforce in regional Queensland may need the same capability, yet face different technology, scheduling and operational constraints.

The strongest analysis brings together business leaders, frontline employees, managers and subject matter experts. It tests what people currently do, what they need to do differently, and why adoption may fail after the workshop or online module ends.

This process also gives learning teams a defensible way to prioritise investment. Rather than measuring attendance alone, they can connect capability development with productivity, safety, customer experience, compliance or revenue outcomes.

Start With The Business Performance Gap

Begin with the result the organisation needs to improve. A request such as “we need leadership training” is too broad to guide design. Ask which leadership behaviour is missing, where it appears in daily work, and what the business is experiencing as a consequence.

The gap might involve inconsistent performance conversations, slow decisions, weak handovers or poor use of a new system. In a Sydney office, the issue may be collaboration across hybrid teams; in a FIFO operation, it could be supervisor communication during shift changes. Defining the observable problem prevents a generic solution from being mistaken for a useful one.

Interview senior sponsors about strategic priorities, then validate their assumptions with employees and managers. Leaders may describe a motivation problem when the real barrier is unclear process guidance, limited authority, unsuitable tools or workload pressure. A reliable diagnosis separates knowledge, skill, motivation and environmental causes.

Gather Evidence From The Work

Use several evidence sources rather than relying on a survey alone. Review quality data, customer complaints, safety incidents, sales results, system records and manager observations. Compare high-performing and struggling teams to identify patterns that a broad average can hide.

Employee interviews and focus groups should explore the moments when performance breaks down. Ask people to describe the last time they faced the task, what they did, what made it difficult and what support they used. Plain Australian language helps here: practical prompts and a straightforward “what gets in the way?” often produce better detail than formal corporate wording.

Include regional and operational realities in the analysis. An employee working from home in Hobart may have different access to support from someone on a construction site near Darwin. Rosters, internet connectivity, travel time, union consultation, workplace health and safety requirements and peak trading periods can all affect whether learning is used.

Prioritise Needs With A Clear Evidence Model

Once evidence is collected, rate each need by business impact, frequency, risk and readiness for change. This helps distinguish an urgent capability gap from a preference for a new course. It also clarifies where a performance support tool, process change or manager coaching may be more appropriate than formal training.

A simple comparison can bring stakeholders into alignment:

Need identified	Evidence to examine	Likely intervention	Adoption measure
Inconsistent coaching	Staff feedback and retention data	Manager practice sessions and job aids	Quality and frequency of coaching conversations
Low system usage	Login records and task completion	Guided practice with in-workflow support	Active use and completion time
Safety procedure errors	Incident reports and observations	Scenario-based learning plus supervisor checks	Correct procedure compliance
Weak customer handovers	Complaint themes and call reviews	Role-play, templates and team huddles	Fewer repeat contacts or escalations

The analysis should finish with a prioritised capability map, not a long catalogue of topics. A useful business case explains the current state, desired behaviour, affected groups, root causes, proposed response and expected value. This creates a stronger foundation for maximise training value and for deciding what to measure.

Build Adoption Into The Learning Design

Adoption is shaped before launch. Give learners realistic practice, short resources and clear opportunities to apply the new behaviour. Learning bursts can suit Australian teams with limited release time, while facilitated sessions may be essential for complex judgement, leadership or safety scenarios.

Managers need an active role. Provide conversation guides, observation checklists and prompts for team meetings so that reinforcement becomes part of normal work. For a busy Brisbane contact centre or a regional hospital, a five-minute huddle may be more sustainable than another long classroom session.

Use real tasks, systems and decisions from the target workplace.
Involve respected frontline employees in testing the content.
Offer accessible formats for mobile, low-bandwidth and shift-based work.
Brief managers on the behaviour they must reinforce.
Remove process or technology barriers identified during the analysis.
Set an early follow-up point to review usage and confidence.

A credible internal champion can also improve relevance. Someone such as Larry Ackerman’s corporate identity expertise can help connect individual behaviour with the identity and culture an organisation wants to express.

Measure Transfer And Business Impact

Evaluation should begin with a baseline taken during the needs analysis. Record current performance, confidence, error rates, cycle times or customer outcomes before learning starts. Afterward, track whether employees apply the behaviour, whether managers observe it and whether business indicators move in the expected direction.

Use a combination of measures. Participation and assessment scores show reach and knowledge, but adoption data is more revealing: system usage, completed checklists, quality reviews, manager observations and employee confidence over time. Financial impact may be estimated through reduced rework, faster service, lower incidents or improved retention, provided the assumptions are transparent.

Review results at useful intervals rather than waiting for an annual report. A 30-day check can reveal access or manager-support problems, while a 90-day review can test sustained behaviour and business movement. The next concrete step is to convene a 60-minute evidence session with a sponsor, frontline manager, employee representatives and an analyst, then agree on one measurable performance gap to investigate first.

Learning to Performance

Learning to Performance, a complete training approach, gives companies world-class training to drive significant return. This approach includes upfront work (Impact Mapping, design), training (for staff and company executives), and post-training efforts to ensure training transfer. This unique recipe - the key for successful training and adoption - is changing the way companies implement training. This methodology could work with any content for organizations in any industry.