Employee Experience
Training Needs Survey Questions for Employees: Examples (+ Free Template)
Article written by Parvathi Vijayamohan
Content Marketer at SurveySparrow
6 min read
13 January 2026
Employee Experience
Article written by Parvathi Vijayamohan
Content Marketer at SurveySparrow
6 min read
13 January 2026
76% of employees find a company when they have extra skills training for their staff. But before jumping on that learning program, you need to ask the right questions. That’s why we have training needs survey questions for employees.
In general, there are two types of training surveys:
This article will focus on the second type – training needs surveys. We will:
A training needs assessment is designed to find where an employee is at in terms of skills and competencies, and how far they are from the skill level that you expect from them.
The gap between these two is the training gap, and it’s your job to find out the training needs that exist within this gap.
Training Needs = Required competency – Current competency
So with a training needs questionnaire, your HR team can figure out those needs, and use this data to update their training programs – or adopt a new approach altogether. The end goal is to improve performance.
But wait, it’s not only about performance! Fun fact: according to Marketing91, there are fourteen situations that can make a training needs survey for employees absolutely necessary. These include:
Here’s a sample training needs survey made with a SurveySparrow template.
Training Needs Survey Questions for Employees Template
Use This TemplateThis question has three goals:
Lastly, you can also determine the scope of the training – if it should be spread across the company, or if it should be for a specific region or team.
From orientation training to diversity training, businesses do employee training programs based on their requirements.
But training needs can also change with every rung climbed on the career ladder. This question will help you infer what each type of employee might need. Here are some examples of training needs at various levels:
Multilingual employees don’t just communicate better. They also translate (no pun intended) into more clients.
Depending on the job roles, locations, and clientele, your employees will need to be good at languages other than English. So this training needs survey question is for measuring language skill gaps.
On the flip side, it also tells you the employee’s preferred language. This makes it so much easier to translate the study material – no second guessing.
PS: If multilingual staff are a priority, you can use the Group Rank question type to rank the employee’s language choices according to how proficient they are. In other words, your employees can sort their language choices as groups – like “Basic”, “Conversant” “Fluent”, “Clueless”, etc.
Group Rank Question Type from SurveySparrow on Vimeo.
This question lets your employees evaluate themselves for vital skills like communication, creativity, problem-solving etc. This can be done smoothly with SurveySparrow’s matrix grid question type. Also, you can follow up with the question below:
“Can you tell us the reason for your scores?”
Why? Because there could be plenty of reasons for poor performance – lack of training is just one of them.
With this question, we can infer if the employee, with their current skill set, is a good fit for the job role. However, as we all know, perceptions do not always reflect reality!
So for a fuller picture, it’s good to cross-verify with 1:1 meetings with the employees – and their managers. Also, regular 360 degree feedback will give you a much bigger body of data to draw from.
Based on staff demands, you can choose an appropriate training method. There are plenty of options available nowadays, from traditional classroom learning, on-the-job training, to online learning tools like Coursera.
Moreover, if lots of employees are demanding training in the same areas, you might want to look at updating your current training resources. Often, employee demands can tell us the areas where we need to improve.
While the performance benefits are obvious, training needs survey questions for employees can also lead to these outcomes:
As we discussed, these questions are a good starting point to understanding what your employees require in terms of training.
Moreover, here are a couple of tips to help you write more of your own:
To find out more, drop us a line. We are just a chat away.
Thousands of brands trust SurveySparrow to turn feedback into growth. Try it free today!
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