The Needs Navigator

A Human-Centered Design Tool

The Needs Navigator is a scalable and responsive tool designed to transform how we assess and address the disparity between the skills currently in the workforce and those demanded by employers. This tool is data-driven and human-centered, ensuring that learning is equitable, accessible, and adaptable.

Organizational Needs Assessment

Effective training begins with a thorough understanding of organizational needs and challenges. This section guides you through a systematic approach to training assessment, helping you distinguish between true training needs and other organizational issues that may require different interventions. Using these tools and templates, you’ll be equipped to:

  • Identify genuine skill gaps versus process or management issues
  • Evaluate existing training effectiveness
  • Assess organizational readiness and resources
  • Determine appropriate intervention strategies
  • Build stakeholder alignment
  • Create measurable success criteria


The framework provides a structured path for gathering, analyzing, and acting on assessment data, ensuring your training solutions address root causes rather than symptoms.

The Learner

Understanding your learners is fundamental to creating effective training solutions. Learner assessment moves beyond basic demographics to develop a comprehensive understanding of your target audience’s characteristics, needs, motivations, and learning contexts. This section provides tools and frameworks to help you gather and analyze crucial information about your learners—from their existing skills and experience levels to their work environment and technological capabilities. By thoroughly assessing these factors, you can design training that resonates with your audience, addresses their specific challenges, and accommodates their learning preferences and constraints. The insights you gather here will directly inform your instructional design choices, helping you create learning experiences that are both engaging and effective. Through careful learner analysis, you’ll ensure your training solutions are learner-centric and positioned for maximum impact.

Personalizing Design

Tailoring Learning to Individual and Organizational Needs:
Personalized learning transforms traditional workforce training by aligning individual development with business objectives. This approach begins with organizational assessments that identify business goals, skill gaps, technological infrastructure, and cultural readiness.

At the same time, learner assessments uncover existing competencies, career goals, work contexts, and learning preferences. Together, these insights create a strong foundation for adaptive learning pathways that serve both the employee and the organization.

Data-Driven Learning for Maximum Impact:
The power of personalized learning lies in its ability to use assessment data throughout the learning journey:

  • Organizational assessments shape the structure and delivery methods, ensuring training integrates seamlessly into existing workflows.
  • Individual assessments guide content customization, pace adjustments, and pathway selection to fit different learning styles and job roles.


Real-Time Adaptation for Continuous Growth:
By continuously gathering and analyzing learner progress data, training can adapt in real time—providing extra support or advanced content as needed. This dynamic approach enhances engagement, improves skill development, and ensures both employees and organizations thrive.

Measuring Impact

Effective training evaluation is a systematic process that measures learning outcomes and organizational impact. This goes beyond basic metrics like completion rates to demonstrate real value and drive continuous improvement. Evaluation serves three core purposes: validating learning objectives, measuring
improvements, and identifying enhancement opportunities. The different types of evaluation align with these different purposes.

  • Formative evaluation during delivery enables real-time adjustments.
  • Summative evaluation measures overall impact.
  • Implementation evaluation assesses the quality of delivery and reception to maximize the value of evaluation and establish clear success criteria that are measurable, achievable, and aligned with business goals. 


This enables training professionals to demonstrate return on investment (ROI), make evidence-based improvements, and ensure training solutions continue meeting both learner needs and organizational goals.

The key to success lies in selecting appropriate measurement methods for different contexts, analyzing multiple data points, and creating actionable improvement plans based on concrete evidence rather than assumptions.

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Navigating Needs Framework © 2025 by Shelby Sharpe, Madeline Isch, and Renée Johnson-Richter is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0.

Certain images used in this work are © Copyright Shelby Sharpe, used with permission, and are not covered by the Creative Commons license. For permissions regarding these images, contact [email protected].