Team and Collective Training Needs Analysis (TCTNA): Identifying Training Requirements and Specifying Solutions

This paper describes Team and Collective Training Needs Analysis (TCTNA), which is a novel approach to the identification of training requirements and the specification and evaluation of training environments appropriate to team and collective training. Our defence forces face operating environments of ever-increasing complexity, whilst current budgetary and environmental pressures necessitate increasing reliance being placed on synthetic training environments. The challenge to the training community is to ensure that training environments are correctly specified so that effective training environment options can be selected. Whilst the principles of Needs Analysis/Front End Analysis have a well established tradition within NATO Forces, the underpinning analytical techniques are predominantly focused on individual training. In the published literature there are relatively few techniques that address the issues of team and collective training. The first part of the paper describes the architecture of the TCTNA method and its underpinning model of team training. The second part of the paper demonstrates how analytical techniques from the human factors and software engineering domains can be adapted and integrated with some new representations to implement this approach, illustrated with a case study from maritime local area surface defence.