L&D professionals were asked to share the insider secrets their profession doesn’t like to talk about. The responses were interesting and, at times, uncomfortable.
The top answers painted a picture of an industry aware of its own shortcomings but largely unable to act on them.
For instance, respondents shared that:
- Training rarely changes the environment learners return to
- One-off learning events don’t work
- Most programmes aren’t designed around how people actually learn
- Practitioners frequently don’t know what they’re trying to achieve in the first place.
It seems that L&D departments have been struggling for quite some time due to a lack of support and the ability to redesign their approach. Does the issue lie in the organisational buy-in? Let’s find out.
The environment problem nobody wants to own
The top response cited by the majority of respondents was that learning interventions fail because nothing around the learner changes. And the content of a learning initiative is rarely the problem. The workplace a learner returns to is.
You can run a brilliantly designed leadership programme, complete with case studies, role plays and reflective practice. But if the manager still rewards the old behaviour and nothing structurally changes, the learning will fade away. Immunity to change is one of the biggest issues.
Environmental factors such as management behaviour, organisational systems and physical and cultural context are often more powerful determinants of how people act at work than any training intervention.
Kurt Lewin’s foundational work on behaviour change in the 1940s established that behaviour is a function of the person and their environment. Yet, decades later, L&D still tends to focus almost exclusively on the person.
Until the profession is treated as a change function rather than a training function, that problem will keep winning.
L&D still tends to focus almost exclusively on the person
The illusion of the learning event
‘One and done’ doesn’t work. This finding will surprise precisely no one who has ever worked in L&D. Yet it somehow remains the dominant commissioning model in many organisations.
The concept of the forgetting curve, first described by Hermann Ebbinghaus in the 1880s, demonstrated that people forget a significant proportion of what they learn within days if there is no reinforcement.
Modern cognitive science has built substantially on this. Research into spaced practice and retrieval practice all points the same way. It suggests that learning largely disappears if it happens in a single event and is never revisited.
At the end of the day, an event is just a small slice of the learning journey. Practice, feedback and reinforcement are what actually drive change, and the event is the beginning of that process.
Breaking this cycle requires designing learning journeys rather than learning events, with follow-up activities, manager check-ins and practice opportunities.
Designing against the evidence
Sadly, some L&D design practices run counter to what the field actually knows about how people learn. For instance, passive content consumption can masquerade as learning and assessments are designed to confirm attendance rather than test genuine understanding.
However, learners must actually do the work. Effortful processing, retrieving it from memory, applying it to real-life situations – this is what builds durable knowledge. Watching a video does not achieve this on its own.
In fact, many assessments can be passed without learning anything at all. For instance, the longest answer in a multiple choice test is most likely to be the correct one. Better design starts with knowing your audience.
The clearer the picture of who is learning and what they actually need to do differently, the easier it becomes to focus on genuine skill building.
People forget a significant proportion of what they learn within days if there is no reinforcement
The measurement gap and the overlooked manager
L&D frequently operates without a clear definition of the business or performance outcome it’s meant to produce. Without that, programmes get evaluated on completion rates and satisfaction scores. These are metrics that are easy to collect and tell you almost nothing about whether people are doing anything differently at work.
Unless relevant metrics are established from the outset, there’s no credible way to claim that training produced the results it was supposed to.
A proper measurement strategy starts before the intervention is designed. It requires stakeholders to agree on a specific, observable change in behaviour or performance and following up afterwards to see what actually changed.
Woven through all of this is the question of manager involvement. L&D needs to work with everyone else in the organisation to make sure programmes involve managers in pre- and post-training processes.
A learner’s direct manager has more influence over whether new skills are applied on the job than almost any feature of the training itself.
If a manager doesn’t know what their team member was supposed to learn, doesn’t create opportunities to apply it and doesn’t reinforce the behaviour when it occurs, the probability of transfer drops dramatically.
Pre-training, managers can set expectations and create psychological safety for people to try new approaches. Post-training, they can check in and model the behaviours they want to see. Both are routinely left out.
Organisations need to be reminded, consistently, that training is a means of performance improvement
The gap between knowing and doing
Taken together, these findings describe an industry that has accumulated substantial knowledge about what effective learning looks like, and then consistently struggles to apply it.
Some of that gap is structural, as L&D teams are under-resourced and asked to deliver at speed. Some is political, because challenging a stakeholder’s assumption that a two-hour workshop will fix a performance problem is an uncomfortable conversation to have when they control your budget. And some is simply that measuring completions is easier than measuring change.
Creating the conditions to act differently requires L&D practitioners to repeatedly make the case for the time and organisational support that genuine behaviour change demands. At the same time, organisations need to be reminded, consistently, that training is a means of performance improvement.
