What is a learning needs survey?

A learning needs survey is a questionnaire sent to staff, and often their managers, to find out what skills they feel they lack and what training they want. Before an AI agent rollout, it shows how ready people believe they are to work with and oversee agents, which is useful but not the same as how ready they are.

Why does a learning needs survey matter for agent rollouts?

It is quick, cheap and reaches everyone. In a large organisation, it may be the only way to hear from every team before deciding where training goes first. It also signals to staff that their view counts, which matters when agents are changing their work.

Its weakness is that people cannot report gaps they do not know about. A reviewer who has never seen a held action with external provenance will not list "provenance" as a need.

How does a learning needs survey work in practice?

A good survey for agent rollouts mixes self-rating with questions people can answer accurately:

1. Role facts. What do you approve today? How many items a day? At what value?
2. Confidence. How sure are you, on a five-point scale, that you could tell why an agent held an item?
3. Exposure. Have you used an agent workspace? Reviewed agent drafts?
4. Preferences. Format, timing, audio or text, group or alone.
5. Open question. What worries you about working alongside agents?

Keep it under ten minutes. The role facts are often the most useful answers, because they tell you who will be making high-value decisions.

What does a learning needs survey look like in practice?

Take a hospital planning an agent that drafts appointment rebookings and referral letters. The survey goes to administrative and clinical staff. Responses show high confidence among booking staff and low confidence among clinicians. The role facts tell a different story: booking staff will approve dozens of held rebookings a day, clinicians only a few referral letters.

The hospital decides that booking staff go first, despite their confidence. That reasoning is set out in who in a hospital needs agent training first. A university faces similar choices, covered in who in a university needs agent training first.

How is a learning needs survey different from a training needs analysis?

A survey collects opinions and facts from staff. A training needs analysis for agents is the fuller exercise: it starts from the work, the agents and their depth, the decisions each role will make, and the risks, then uses the survey as one input among several. The survey says what people think they need; the analysis says what the work requires.

A readiness test is the third input, because it shows what people actually know.

Which related terms should you know?

• Readiness assessment: a test that measures knowledge directly.
• Blended learning: mixing formats, often shaped by survey preferences.
• Learning path: the planned route of courses for a role, which the survey can help shape.

For the full approach, see training teams for AI agents.

Where the Academy fits

Pryme Intelligence Academy offers a free readiness assessment for teams of up to 25 people. The team takes the Foundations test set in its industry, and the report shows scores by concept, the gaps, and the first agent to start with. Run alongside a needs survey, it tests what people believe against what they know.