Why Your Professional Development Offerings are a Waste

Companies spend more than $400 billion a year on learning and development (L&D). Yet study after study shows that corporate training leaves everyone, from the CEO down to the line-level manager, feeling underwhelmed.

• 8% of CEOs see discernible business impacts from their company training initiatives. 

• 75% of managers feel their firm’s training function is inadequate. 

• 12% of employees report using anything they’ve learned in training in the course of their work. 

So what’s the problem? Why are all these dollars and hours burned on an experience that universally gets the “meh” rating?

We’ve identified eight factors that doom your executive development program; vulnerabilities that can be easily eliminated with good design disciplines.

1. Lack of Customization. Seduced by the efficiency of off-the-shelf solutions, and bulldozed by the hard-sell tactics of consultants, training purchasers are ignoring a simple truth: one size does not fit all. Context shapes the components, tone, and desired outcomes of every training investment. Your context is unique to the industry, season, and operating priorities of your firm and the training you use should reflect that.

   
   

2. Strategy Misalignment. Learning and development efforts rarely flow from the collectively engineered and embraced strategic priorities of the senior team. This drives a fractured and scatter-shot approach to training. Driven by the opinions and tastes of individual executives instead of a comprehensive plan to drive performance, is it any wonder most trainings are missing the mark?

   
   

3. Senior Leadership is MIA. Senior leaders are resigned to the need for training. And most are accomplished executives in their own right. Yet it is the rare leader who actively drives training design or is even present to pass on lessons to trainees. This communicates that training is a sideshow, a throwaway, and not that central to the future of the business. Senior leadership should be an active part of training, emphasizing its importance and value to everyone in the company. 
   

4. Information Heavy Design. Much of the L&D content out there has inherited an unhelpful assumption from academia–information equals transformation. Here’s the truth: adults do not learn by sitting through hour upon hour of content downloads. This fail is broken into two subcategories. The most common is the dump and run, a single workshop of lecture-heavy material. The second is the overcrowded curriculum. This is the experience where trainers attempt to level up too many skills in one offering. The net result is a stack of useless notebooks and assessments that never succeed in building the leaders of the future. 
   

5. Stuck on the Surface. This happens when content does not address the underlying company culture and employee mindsets. We define culture as “how we get work done and relate to each other while working.” A relational culture will always resist a digital transformation initiative that is heavy on data entry. An individual commission culture will never embrace a team orientation without dealing with the compensation system. A related issue has to do with mindsets. Peddling skills without digging beneath the surface to the values and rewards that will motivate the regular practice of those skills delivers training that fails to produce lasting results. 
   

6. Lack of Continuity. Decoupled from macro strategy and the attention of senior leaders, most L&D programs lack continuity. With a patchwork of vendors, programs, and tools, corporate training feels like a flavor-of-the-month club instead of a disciplined, consistent focus that becomes embedded in the culture. Lack of continuity robs the program of momentum, limits the ability of L&D to build a common culture, and makes measuring effectiveness impossible. 
   

7. Lack of Measurement. Less than 25% of executive development initiatives are evaluated for business outcomes. Robust outcomes measurement is rare in most training and development initiatives. As an expert in qualitative measurement, I’m familiar with an extensive toolbox of methods to discern whether or not a specific experience is producing the results desired. However, “measurement” is not a common practice in the learning and development profession. 
   

8. Busy Work Instead of Real Work. Participation in a training program requires extra time and effort from trainees. Without a direct line from program content to their current demands and deliverables, staff members experience little payoff for their efforts. This renders training with two less-than-worthwhile evaluations: 1) interesting but irrelevant, or 2) painful and irrelevant.

Here’s how to get everyone to raise their hand. When I stand in front of a crowd of professionals, I know the secret to getting everyone to raise their hand. I ask, “How many of you have had to sit through corporate training that was a waste of your time and the company’s money?” Every hand goes up. That doesn’t have to be true of your training. We can tell you how. 

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See how RKE Partner’s training could make all the difference for your team. Schedule a consultation today.