Articles

Why formal organisational training doesn’t work

13th May 2024

In March 2020 my organisation sent me on a compulsory online course on manual handling. I had no interest in learning how to move heavy boxes, but resentfully I logged on, giving it minimal time and minimal attention and learning practically nothing.

At that time, I was working as a university lecturer. The Covid pandemic lockdown had just started and I was trying to learn about this new thing called Zoom, scrabbling around to find some information on running virtual lectures, and failing to get my head around Newton’s third law (my son was doing his GCSEs). I had many training needs that Spring, but manual handling was not one of them.

Sadly, my experience of training that is not relevant, not voluntary and not timely, is also, not unusual. But what a waste!

Organisational training and development is big business. The annual cost of organisational training globally runs to hundreds of billions of dollars (Statista - ref) and in the UK alone, the government estimates that there are more than 100 million training days in the workplace each year (DfE ref). Good quality, relevant training can make an enormous difference to productivity and to individual levels of job satisfaction (refs), but the statistics on the actual impact of training are somewhat dispiriting. Only 25% of trainees say that they have learnt anything from a typical organisational training course and only around 11% report that they have applied their new learning in their work. You can obviously do the maths yourself, but just to underline the point, that means that nearly 90% of organisational training is wasted.

So where do we go so wrong? How is it that so many organisations waste so much time and money each year, running training courses that have minimal value?

Research points to five mistakes that organisations very commonly make (Blume et al., 2019; Ford, Baldwin & Prasad, 2018).

1)     Training that covers the wrong content: Most organisations tend to offer training on the basis of a good guess as to the kind of training that employees probably need; but you can’t hope to design a useful training programme if you don’t know what exactly the training needs are. A good learning and development offer always starts with a training needs analysis - a period of structured research where organisations identify the skills or knowledge that is missing. This then allows the organisation to develop or commission training courses that will be relevant and genuinely useful for employees. It’s time consuming, but it really is the cornerstone of a good training and development offer.

2)     Training that is offered at the wrong time. People learn best when they have a real and immediate need for the new information or skills. Learning will be more effective if delegates can see the contribution that their new skills can make to a project they are working on at the time. Training therefore needs to be agile, to ensure that employees can access the right training at the right time.

3)     Delegates who are there for the wrong reasons. It is not uncommon for a trainer to face a room full of delegates who don’t have any interest in the topic itself, but have come along because somewhere someone has decreed that the course is compulsory for all staff. The evidence is clear that trainees who have chosen to attend a course are more likely to learn, and much more likely to apply their learning at work. Compulsory training can get good results but the trainer needs to work particularly hard to win the crowd over and establish relevance.

4)     A poorly designed training course. Very few trainers or instructional designers really understand how people learn. Training sessions that are grounded in learning theories are shown to be much more likely to lead to learning and training transfer (ref), and there are plenty of such theories to choose from. Oddly, the one learning theory that seems to have really captured the popular and professional imagination is one that has no impact at all on learning. I’m talking here about learning styles – the idea that people learn in different ways – that some of us are visual learners, and others are active learners and so forth. The truth is that while we might be drawn to different types of training activities, having training material present in a way that reflects our preferences makes no difference whatsoever to how well we learn (ref). The best that can be said about learning styles is that offering varied training sessions is good for learner engagement, but if you want to ground your training in evidence-based pedagogical theories, I suggest you look elsewhere.

5)     Employees who fail to apply the learning quickly. A key message that runs strongly throughout the learning and development literature is the importance of applying new knowledge as soon as possible. Ebbinghaus identified the ‘Forgetting Curve’ which suggests that 75% of what we learn is forgotten within x number of week if we don’t apply it (ref). The opportunity to apply new learning within the workplace obviously relies on timely training, but it also entails having a supportive line manager who can encourage the trainee. New learning from training generally requires two attempts before it becomes embedded (ref), and a proactive line manager can encourage the trainee to get stuck in, and then can help them to reflect on how it goes.

An evidence-based approach to organisational development is time consuming and requires expertise. But doing it right is obviously and inevitably a valuable use of resources.

I wouldn’t like to hazard a guess as to how much money my organisation has spent on manual handling for the lecturers across the university, but I feel pretty sure that every penny has been wasted. Thankfully, in my job I never have to lift anything heavier than a good quality fountain pen, which doesn’t require me to bend from the knees, nor to find a colleague to help with the load. Hmm… perhaps I did learn something after all!