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Training is an investment of time, money and attention.
For an organisation, there is the cost of taking people away from their normal work. For the people attending, there is an expectation that the time will be useful – that they will leave with something they didn't have when they arrived.
So, what actually makes training worthwhile?
It is tempting to measure what is easiest to measure: attendance, completion rates, participant feedback or how much content was covered. These measures have their place. But they don't necessarily tell us whether the learning made a difference.
The more useful question is what happens afterwards.
Did people use what they learned? Did it change the way they approached something? Did it give them a new skill, a different perspective or greater confidence? And, ultimately, did that make a difference to the organisation?
That, arguably, is the point of training.
Training isn't the point. What changes because of it is.
This sounds obvious, but it is an important distinction.
The objective of workplace learning shouldn't simply be to deliver information or complete a programme. If someone can pass a knowledge test but still struggles to apply the learning in their role, something important is missing.
The real test is whether learning makes something possible that wasn't possible before.
A manager handles a difficult conversation rather than postponing it.
A team approaches customer complaints differently.
An employee becomes better at prioritising competing demands.
A supervisor gives clearer feedback.
A person has enough confidence to speak up when something isn't working.
These may sound like relatively small changes. But when they happen consistently, across teams and over time, they are precisely the kinds of changes that can influence performance.
Training has value when learning becomes capability.
The question is becoming harder – and more important
This matters even more as organisations navigate a workplace in which the nature of work is changing quickly.
Skills are evolving. AI is changing how many people do their jobs. Technology is altering processes and expectations. Roles are becoming less predictable, while organisations are asking people to adapt more quickly.
The 2025 LinkedIn Workplace Learning Report found that 49% of learning and talent development professionals surveyed said their executives were concerned that employees did not have the right skills to execute business strategy. This puts L&D in an interesting position. Training can no longer be viewed simply as an employee benefit or a calendar of courses. Learning increasingly has to connect with what the organisation is trying to achieve – while still being meaningful to the people doing the learning.
This doesn't mean every training programme needs an elaborate business case or a spreadsheet showing precisely how many rands it will return.
It does mean asking a more fundamental question:
Why this learning, and why now?
What has changed?
What isn't happening that needs to happen?
What capability is missing?
And is training actually the best way to address it?
This last question is an important one.
Sometimes the problem is a skills gap. Sometimes it is a process, a lack of resources, unclear expectations, or a workplace environment that makes the desired behaviour difficult.
Good L&D doesn't simply ask, “What course should we run?”
It asks, “What needs to change?”
The gap between knowing and doing
One of the less obvious challenges with workplace training is that knowing something and doing something are not the same thing.
- Someone can know how to have a difficult conversation and still avoid it.
- A team can understand the principles of good customer service and still struggle when faced with an angry customer.
- People can know how to prioritise their workload and still find themselves reacting to whatever arrives in their inbox.
This isn't necessarily a failure of training.
Workplaces are complicated. Behaviour is influenced by experience, confidence, relationships, incentives, organisational culture and the pressures people are operating under. But it does tell us something important about learning:
- Information on its own is rarely enough.
- People need opportunities to think about what the learning means in their own context. They need to test ideas, practise skills, make mistakes, ask questions and connect the learning to situations they actually encounter.
This is why practical examples, discussion, role-play, reflection and workplace scenarios can be so valuable.
The aim isn't to make training entertaining for its own sake.
The aim is to make learning usable.
The experience of learning matters
People don't arrive at training as blank pages. They bring experience, assumptions, habits, frustrations and questions. Two people can attend exactly the same session and leave with very different things.
One might recognise something about their own behaviour.
Another might rethink the way they manage a colleague.
Someone else might leave with one practical idea they can try the following morning.
That variability isn't necessarily a weakness. It is part of adult learning. People make sense of new ideas by connecting them to what they already know and to the situations they recognise.
This is also why the facilitator matters.
A good facilitator isn't simply there to deliver information. They create the conditions for people to think, participate, question an assumption, share an experience or look at a familiar situation differently.
Sometimes the most valuable part of a training programme isn't on the slide at all. It is the conversation that happens around it.
Relevance matters – to the business and to the individual
There is also a growing expectation that learning should feel relevant not only to where people are today, but to where work is going.
LinkedIn's 2024 Workplace Learning Report identified aligning learning programmes with business goals as the top L&D priority among those surveyed. The report also highlighted the growing importance of career development and found that 91% of L&D professionals surveyed said soft skills were becoming increasingly important.
There is an important connection here.
Organisations need people with capabilities that support their current and future priorities. People, meanwhile, need to remain capable, adaptable, and relevant as their working environment changes.
The strongest learning sits somewhere in that overlap.
It addresses a genuine organisational need while answering a genuine human need to develop. This is a much more useful definition of relevance than simply asking whether people liked the training.
And then there is the transfer problem
Perhaps the biggest test comes when the training ends. The room is packed away. The workbook goes into a drawer. Everyone returns to their normal workload. This is where training transfer becomes important – whether the knowledge, skills, and attitudes gained through training are actually applied in the workplace.
Research into training transfer consistently points to the importance of what happens around the learner, not just what happens during the learning itself.
- The opportunity to practise matters.
- The working environment matters.
- Managerial support matters.
- The opportunity to use the new skill matters.
- So does reinforcement.
This doesn't diminish the importance of the training. Quite the opposite. It reminds us that training is not an isolated event. It is one part of a larger process of changing capability and behaviour. If the workplace gives people no opportunity to use what they have learned, even a very good programme can struggle to have a lasting effect.
So, what is the point of training?
Perhaps the answer is simpler than we sometimes make it. The point of training is not to complete training. It is not to fill a room, cover a workbook, tick a compliance box or generate favourable feedback forms.
The point is to create the conditions for people to know more, think differently, do something better or feel more capable of doing something that matters.
And for HR and L&D, that changes the question we should be asking.
Instead of:
“How much training did we deliver?”
Perhaps we should be asking:
“What needed to change – and did learning help make that change possible?”
This doesn't mean every training programme will produce a dramatic transformation. Nor should it. Sometimes the value is one better conversation. One better decision. One manager who responds differently. One employee who approaches a problem with greater confidence.
But these small shifts matter.
Especially when they are relevant, repeated and supported by the environment people return to every day.
Ultimately, the value of training isn't found in the training room.
It is found in what people are able to do differently when they leave it.
