Learning and development

Training is the most reliably wasted budget in an organization, because attendance is easy to measure and transfer to the job is not.

Start from the capability gap

Training is a solution. Establish the problem first: what should people be able to do that they cannot, and is the cause actually capability?

Frequently it is not. If someone knows how but does not, look for the real obstacle — no time, a process that makes the right thing harder, an incentive pointing elsewhere, or no feedback on whether they did it correctly. Training a motivation or system problem changes nothing and consumes the budget that would have fixed it.

Design for transfer

Most of what people can actually do is learned by doing it, with feedback, on real work. Formal instruction is a small part and it decays quickly without application.