Collective training lies at the heart of delivering military capability. It is the crucible within which the individual skills of our highly trained and capable soldiers, sailors and airmen are melded together to enable them to deliver winning collective effects. Effective training systems are built upon a foundation of rigorous and robust Training Needs Analysis (TNA), which embraces task analysis, training gap analysis and training options analysis. The TNA process for individual training, as part of the Systems Approach to Training or Instructional Systems Design, is well established in both the literature and in military practice. However the same cannot be said for such a process applied to collective training.

Collective training is inherently more complex than individual training in terms of the tasks being conducted by the trainees, the instructional tasks and the nature of the environment that has to be provided to support the training. In this paper we describe a new analytical framework for collective TNA, which is designed to address these issues. Within this framework, a range of established human factors and systems engineering methods and representational techniques can be utilised to conduct the analysis of both the training task and the instructional task. The synthesis of the analytical outputs facilitates the modelling of the training environment that is required to support these tasks and their associated interactions. The description of the framework is followed by illustrations of some of the techniques that are being explored and developed to facilitate each of the analytical steps.