The Real Truth About Professional Development Training (Three Things Nobody Tells You)
Right, let me tell you something that’s going to annoy half the training industry. The majority of workplace training programs are total waste of money. There , I said it.
Been delivering corporate training programs around Australia for nearly two years, and I think about 70% of what passes for “professional development” these days are nothing more than costly compliance theatre that make HR departments feel good about their budgets.
Last month I walked into a Fortune 500 company in North Sydney. Beautiful harbour views, fancy coffee machine, the works. They’d just spent $180,000 on a leadership program that involved trust falls and personality tests. Trust exercises! In this day and age! I asked the participants what they’d learned that they could use on Monday morning. Blank stares all around.
This is what the training industry won’t tell you: most training fails because it treats adults like university students instead of adults juggling multiple priorities. We pile them into conference rooms, show them PowerPoint slides about “synergistic leadership paradigms” (whatever the hell that means), and expect magic to happen.
But here’s the thing that really gets me wound up. The training industry has convinced everyone that professional growth comes from formal sessions. Wrong. Dead wrong. Genuine skill development happens on the job. It happens when the experienced team member walks someone through the client database. It happens when a manager debriefs a challenging situation with their team member.
I learned this the hard way about seven years back. Was running these complex two-day leadership intensives. Lots of group exercises, simulation activities, action plans that participants would write on poster boards and display around the room. Felt very significant. Very complete.
Then I started following up after half a year. Know what I found? Nothing had changed in their daily work. The action plans were sitting in filing cabinets forgotten.
I finally understood we had it completely the wrong way around.
Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not anti-training. Companies like Atlassian and Canva have shown that when you get professional development right, it transforms entire cultures. But they’re not doing personality assessments. They’re doing something completely different.
The first thing that actually works? Short, focused training sessions addressing real workplace issues. No more than half an hour. One specific skill. Used straight away. I’ve seen teams master sophisticated project management software this way when traditional eight-hour workshops achieved nothing.
Next approach: peer-to-peer knowledge transfer programs. Not mentoring (that’s too formal and often doesn’t work). I’m talking about organised systems where skilled team members teach others with colleagues who need those exact skills. Works great when you strip away the bureaucratic nonsense and just let people teach each other.
The last approach: what I call “learning laboratories.” Small groups tackling real workplace problems together over several weeks. No trainer delivering content. No fixed learning objectives. Just capable teams tackling genuine challenges and recording lessons.
Here’s the interesting part. The resistance to this approach usually comes from the people running professional development. They’ve invested so much in established learning systems that admitting it doesn’t work feels like career destruction. I get it. Change is scary when your job depends on the old way of doing things.
Let me share something else that’s awkward. Some people genuinely prefer sitting in a room being taught at rather than driving their professional growth. It’s more comfortable. Less demanding. You can scroll through emails, pretend to pay attention, and still claim youre “investing in your career.”
Organisations that succeed recognise that learning isn’t a one-off activity. It’s an ongoing process. It’s baked into how work gets done, not something that happens separate from work.
Take ANZ’s strategy for training their customer service managers. Instead of classroom sessions about customer service excellence, they paired seasoned leaders with developing staff for genuine service situations. Learning happened during actual work, with immediate feedback and correction. Customer satisfaction scores in participating branches jumped 23% within four months.
I can hear what you’re saying. “What about required safety training? What about legal compliance programs?” Fair point. Regulatory training must occur even if it’s not particularly exciting. But even then, you can make it useful and useful instead of mind-numbing slide shows.
What’s fundamentally wrong with workplace training is it addresses effects rather than root issues. Staff morale is down? Book them into an inspiration seminar! Conflicts between teams? Interpersonal skills workshops for all staff! But if your company culture is toxic, no amount of training will fix it.
I’ve seen this play out dozens of times. Business pours resources into transformation workshops because their recent changes aren’t working. But the real issue is that they announced the changes badly, excluded important stakeholders from decision-making, and created anxiety about future roles. Learning programs can’t solve leadership failures.
Here’s another controversial opinion: not everyone needs to be developed. Some people are perfectly happy doing their current job well and have little appetite for increased accountability or learning. The whole “every employee should be constantly growing” mentality creates pointless pressure and wastes resources that could be better used on individuals genuinely interested in advancement.
Effective learning initiatives begin with genuine discussions about individual goals. Not what the company thinks they should want. What they individually seek. Then they create routes to support those goals, using a mix of structured training, hands-on experience, and colleague assistance.
But making this work requires managers who can have those honest conversations. And many supervisors weren’t trained in meaningful dialogue. So you end up needing to educate the supervisors before they can help others’ learning. It’s complex and messy and doesn’t fit neatly into quarterly training calendars.
Evaluation problems multiply the problems. We measure training satisfaction scores and completion rates because they’re simple to record. But none reveal actual skill development. Authentic evaluation needs extended observation, and requires tracking actual workplace performance changes.
Organisations committed to learning create comprehensive measurement frameworks. They measure whether staff put their learning into practice, whether collaborative effectiveness increases, whether company performance transforms. It’s more difficult but distinguishes effective initiatives from expensive time-wasters.
What’s the bottom line here? If you’re responsible for professional development in your organisation, start by reviewing your existing programs. Not the feedback ratings. The actual impact. Are people doing things differently because of the training they received? Are company performance enhancing? Be absolutely truthful about what’s working and what isn’t.
Then commence with limited scope. Pick a single domain requiring particular capabilities and design a program that lets them use their learning in genuine workplace scenarios with support and feedback. Measure the results properly. Grow the program systematically.
Tomorrow’s workplace learning won’t happen in hotel meeting rooms and training venues. It’s in building environments where development occurs organically, constantly, and meaningfully. But that requires changing most of our traditional methods.
That’s likely why companies will continue investing in costly training programs.
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