Training Needs Assessment for New York City Government Agencies

New York City’s government employees receive centralized training from the Department of Citywide Administrative Services (DCAS) and decentralized training from their respective agencies. DCAS has taken minor steps toward determining the feasibility of a more centralized system, a Government University, and engaged the services of a Capstone team to assist them in the early stages of this process.The goal of the project was to conduct a needs assessment of the independent training structure of each NYC government agency. The needs assessment consisted of three components: creation of a survey that was distributed to all NYC government agencies; interviewing a small group of representative city agencies to do an in-depth analysis of their training needs; and the use of another group of agencies as a focus group. Preliminary analysis of the findings has highlighted possible ways agencies could better collaborate in training which will increase employees’ access to various training classes and reduce costs.