Why Most Training Fails and How to Make Yours Work

We’re not necessarily wrong in believing that training sessions can work—they just don’t always accomplish what we think they accomplish. Training is not a one-stop shop. The adjustment necessary to embrace their potential is not in having a reduced expectation of impact but a reframed understanding of it. We need to stop thinking of training as one-and-done efforts and think of them as teasers: whetting the palate enough to begin a journey of learning that will expand well beyond the training itself to stick.

This is not about setting a low bar. For instance, reducing the amount of content included in your training allows you to refine and enhance its quality because you can spend more time honing in on key ideas that stick instead of lightly brushing over many things that don’t. We’ve done many workshops and training sessions at TDL, and believe me, scaling back to dig deep is much harder work than throwing everything but the kitchen sink at your trainees. So no, we are not in need of setting the bar for trainees lower but rather setting the bar for trainers higher. 

Here are three goal-setting mistakes we see organizations make time and time again in training and what you can do to avoid these pitfalls:

1. Ill-informed or Unrealistic Goals

Be clear about the purpose of your training and consider ways to reinforce learnings from your one-off session to achieve your desired results. After all, continuous learning opportunities foster long-term change. 

However, don’t overlook the short-term benefits of training sessions, such as building rapport, creating collaborative opportunities, generating ideas, and fostering a sense of community around specific topics or initiatives. Recognizing these (more realistic) short-term benefits allows you to optimize your training efforts and maximize their impact.

2. Condensing Instead of Omitting

Do not make materials more succinct or condensed in order to reduce content. If you are covering too much, omit the nonessentials. Be realistic about participants’ capacity to retain the information you share and the participants’ immediate need for that information. Know that too much information can keep participants from retaining any of it (this is called information overload). Instead of trying to cover it all, focus on ensuring that participants are developing the scaffolding needed to walk away from the training and build on it. 

3. Focusing on Answers Instead of Questions

Start with your desired outcomes (like your immediate Calls to Action (CTAs) or desired shift in employee behavior) to make sure that your inputs help you get there (like training activities to lead employees to the desired CTA or behavior). When defining CTAs, it's crucial to set realistic expectations. Recognize that trainees will likely still need support or practice after the training. With this in mind, emphasize equipping them with the skills to know what questions to ask and whom to approach, rather than assuming they will immediately have all the answers after attending the training. This approach ensures a more practical and effective training outcome.

So what does this mean for how you actually conduct training? Planning your training should include thoughtful approaches to engagement, learning, and actionability. Ask yourself: is your training built in a manner that will lead to meaningful participation? Is your training successfully going to bridge key knowledge or skill gaps? And last but certainly not least, is your training going to lead to the desired shifts in behavior in the long run? Below are some ways to work towards engaging, learning-centered, and actionable training. 

Engagement

Training in a manner that will inspire meaningful participation

• Interactive Content: Incorporate interactive elements such as polls, quizzes, other game elements, and surveys to keep participants actively involved. 
• Storytelling: Mix up your methods with lectures, group discussions, hands-on activities, and multimedia presentations. Most importantly, share relevant stories to illustrate points and make the material more relatable. Encourage participants to share their experiences and knowledge with each other. Leverage intrinsic motivation by connecting learning to personal and professional goals.
• Pre-Work and Post-Work Assignments: Give participants tasks to complete before and after the training to reinforce learning and guarantee it’s not a one-off effort.
• Networking Opportunities: Create opportunities for participants to network and build connections with each other so that you are not the only person they are learning from–trainees often learn just as much from one another as they do from facilitators. This also helps create a culture of learning that will serve to reinforce training content.

Learning

Training that successfully bridges knowledge or skill gaps

• Problem-Based Learning (PBL): Engage learners with opportunities to develop critical thinking and problem-solving skills. Go beyond just giving example problems and solutions; provide opportunities for participants to work through these examples on their own or in groups.
• Real-World Applications: Use case studies, examples, role-playing, and scenarios relevant to the participants' work to illustrate concepts, as well as incorporate exercises and simulations that allow them to apply what they’ve learned.
• Community of Practice: Build communities of practice (CoP) to facilitate ongoing learning and professional development. CoPs are groups who collaborate regularly to exchange knowledge, learn from each other, and improve their practices based on the training provided.
• Spaced Repetition: Use spaced repetition techniques to enhance long-term retention of information. Spaced repetition is a learning technique that involves reviewing information at specific intervals over time. The goal is to reinforce memory by revisiting material (e.g. using different examples or tasks) just before it is forgotten, which strengthens the retention of that information.

Action

Training that leads to the desired shifts in behavior in the long run

• Self-Assessment and Reflection: Encourage self-assessment and reflection to promote self-awareness and continuous improvement.
• Supportive Learning Environment: Create a supportive and inclusive learning environment that accommodates diverse learners.
• Job-Embedded Learning: Integrate learning into the workplace through job-embedded training and professional development. This can also include embedding explicit opportunities for employees to reflect on applying training CTAs.

Workforce training can be categorized as either proactive or reactive. Proactive training focuses on preparing for future needs by bridging skill gaps for future work demands, promoting growth and leadership, and fostering inclusion and well-being. In contrast, reactive training responds to immediate challenges like technological changes, market shifts, regulation compliance, management changes, and performance issues. 

For both types, engaging, learning-centered, and actionable training goes beyond simply understanding employee needs; it also involves appreciating the context in which these needs arise. When planning training, account for the environmental realities and challenges your employees face. In proactive training, sustaining learning can be challenging since there may not be an immediate need to apply the acquired skills. Therefore, you may need to invest additional time in engaging with trainees outside of the training session. In reactive training, where employees face pressures from a rapidly changing environment, trainees may also need extra support. In this instance, appreciating the context may mean encouraging more interactions among trainees and providing opportunities for peer-to-peer support to enhance engagement and application of the training.

We dedicate so much time and effort into training our employees, with little knowledge of or attention to its true impact. Our tendency to overestimate the impact of brief training sessions is influenced by cognitive biases. Instead of expecting unrealistic and immediate results from one-off sessions, we need to view training as an ongoing process that begins before the session and continues well beyond it. To make your training work for you and your participants, focus on engagement, active learning strategies, and sustainable behavioral changes. Effective training is a catalyst for continuous learning and development, not a quick fix.