Scenario

A midsized custom furniture retail organization has been in business for 30 years. They started their organization in a small town and have seen their greatest growth over the last five years, moving from a small local business to a furniture store known nationwide. The organization has recently acquired 10 new stores and 300 new employees from a competitor, including 100 floor agents. This acquisition will increase the organization’s competitive advantage in suburban areas where it was not servicing and improve its overall outreach and coverage of both metropolitan and suburban areas. Thus, allowing the organization to provide a more extensive portfolio of customers and potential product offerings.

The acquisition has been announced, and the new stores are scheduled for grand reopenings in 60 days. The custom furniture retail organization is looking to capitalize on the increased product knowledge, sales initiatives, and market knowledge gained from the acquisition by focusing on the training and development of the floor agents. Acquiring floor agents from new stores means that the sales tactics, knowledge, and processes differ from store to store, resulting in various objectives, sales drivers, and measures for success within the sales department. To remain competitive in the furniture store industry and to create synergy between the newly acquired and the current stores, training and development of all floor agents is needed.

As the director of strategic training and development, you need to create a training plan to train and prepare the newly acquired floor agents to meet organization expectations regarding sales initiatives and sales training. As you begin strategizing the training and development plan, you realize that the furniture store does not currently have any established process for training floor agents; thus, you will need to develop the training plan from scratch.

Since the competitor organization has retained a number of their current locations, management at your organization has concerns that the competitor may attempt to entice their best employees back to their organization. Management needs you to identify those promising individuals and design a plan to work specifically with them on their career development within the organization and, when possible, plan their integration into the organization’s management.

Requirements

Your submission must be your original work. No more than a combined total of 30% of the submission and no more than a 10% match to any one individual source can be directly quoted or closely paraphrased from sources, even if cited correctly. The similarity report that is provided when you submit your task can be used as a guide.

You must use the rubric to direct the creation of your submission because it provides detailed criteria that will be used to evaluate your work. Each requirement below may be evaluated by more than one rubric aspect. The rubric aspect titles may contain hyperlinks to relevant portions of the course.

Tasks may not be submitted as cloud links, such as links to Google Docs, Google Slides, OneDrive, etc., unless specified in the task requirements. All other submissions must be file types that are uploaded and submitted as attachments (e.g., .docx, .pdf, .ppt).

Training Needs Assessment

A. Create a needs assessment plan to analyze the organization’s training needs and recommend a training strategy by doing the following:
1. Explain how you would assess the organization’s training needs for the newly acquired floor agents.
2. Conduct a strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) analysis of the company’s training needs for the floor agents by doing the following:
a. Identify one strength that is internal to the organization.
i. Explain how the strength affects training needs and outcomes for the floor agents.
b. Identify one weakness that is internal to the organization.
i. Explain how the weakness affects training needs and outcomes for the floor agents.
c. Identify one current opportunity that is external to the organization.
i. Explain how the opportunity affects training needs and outcomes for the floor agents.
d. Identify one current threat that is external to the organization.
i. Explain how the threat affects training needs and outcomes for the floor agents.
3. Describe how one learning theory would inform the development of the training program.
a. Identify two strategies from the chosen learning theory for shaping the learning outcomes of the training program.

4. Describe one legal obligation the employer in the scenario has for the training program, according to one of the following laws:
Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990
Title VII of Civil Rights Act of 1964
Age Discrimination in Employment Act 1967
B. Acknowledge sources, using in-text citations and references, for content that is quoted, paraphrased, or summarized.
C. Demonstrate professional communication in the content and presentation of your submission.

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