Human Capital MBA

Training Needs Assessment and Competency Gap Analysis: McGehee and Thayer's Three-Level Model, and the Evidence That Most Training Skips It Entirely

What McGehee and Thayer's original organizational, operations, and man analysis actually said in 1961, how it became today's organization-task-person model and the competency-gap methods built on top of it, Mager and Pipe's blunt test for whether a performance problem is a training problem at all, and the uncomfortable, peer-reviewed finding that only six percent of published training-effectiveness studies report doing any needs assessment before the training begins.

2 Nov 2026 · 24 min read