Why Most Professional Development Training is Broken (And the Three Things That Actually Work)
Look, I’m about to irritate a lot of people in the corporate training world. Most professional development programs are absolute rubbish. There , I said it.
I’ve been delivering workplace training sessions across Melbourne, Sydney, and Brisbane for the past 17 years, and I figure about 70% of what passes for “professional development” these days is just expensive box-ticking exercises that make HR departments feel good about their budgets.
Recently visited a big company in Brisbane’s business district. Fancy office, expensive fit-out. They’d invested $200,000 in leadership development that included role-playing games and personality profiling. Team building activities! Are you serious! I asked the participants what they’d learned that they could apply on Monday morning. Dead silence.
Here’s what nobody wants to admit: workplace training assumes people learn the same way they did at university instead of experienced professionals who’ve got actual work to do. We herd them into meeting spaces, show them slide decks with pointless business jargon (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 learning happens in workshops. Total nonsense. Actual learning occurs during day to day work. It happens when a senior colleague explains how the approval process actually works. 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 elaborate two-day leadership intensives. Lots of breakout sessions, role-playing scenarios, action plans that participants would write on poster boards and display around the room. Felt very important. Very comprehensive.
Then I started following up after half a year. Know what I found? Nobody was doing anything differently. 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 Google and Microsoft have shown that when you get professional development right, it transforms entire cultures. But they’re not doing trust falls. They’re doing something completely different.
The first thing that actually works? Brief skill-building sessions tackling current challenges. Twenty minutes max. One specific skill. Applied that day. I’ve seen teams master complex project management software this way when traditional full-day courses failed completely.
Second thing: peer-to-peer knowledge transfer programs. Not mentoring (that’s too formal and often doesn’t work). I’m talking about formal processes for internal knowledge transfer with colleagues who need those exact skills. Works brilliantly when you strip away the bureaucratic nonsense and just let people teach each other.
Third: what I call “workplace learning circles.” Focused groups solving genuine work issues together. No facilitator talking at them. No predetermined results. Just capable teams tackling genuine challenges and recording lessons.
This is where things get really telling. 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 acknowledging complete failure. 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. A portion of workers honestly enjoy traditional classroom settings rather than taking ownership of their learning. It’s easier. Less confronting. You can check your phone, doodle in your notebook, and still claim youre “developing professionally.”
The companies getting this right understand that professional development isn’t an event. It’s a system. It’s baked into how work gets done, not something that happens outside of regular responsibilities.
Take ANZ’s strategy for training their customer service managers. Instead of classroom sessions about customer service excellence, they paired experienced managers with newer ones for genuine service situations. Learning happened during actual work, with instant feedback and correction. Service quality metrics improved 25% over the quarter.
Now I know what you’re thinking. “But what about compliance training? What about mandatory OH&S sessions?” Good question. Certain programs are required by law whether they’re interesting or not. But even then, you can make it applicable and useful instead of boring presentation marathons.
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 management systems are completely dysfunctional, no amount of training will fix it.
I’ve seen this play out repeatedly over the years. Company spends big money on change management training because their latest restructure isn’t going well. But the real issue is that they communicated the restructure poorly, left critical team members out of the process, and created confusion about career prospects. Training can’t fix strategic mistakes.
Here’s another controversial opinion: not everyone needs to be developed. Plenty of employees are satisfied performing their present responsibilities effectively and have no interest in additional responsibilities or skills. The whole “all staff need ongoing development” mentality creates pointless pressure and wastes resources that could be better used on individuals genuinely interested in advancement.
The best professional development programs I’ve seen start with honest conversations about what people actually want to achieve. Not what the organisation assumes they need. What they individually seek. Then they build pathways to help them get there, using a mix of formal learning, practical application, and peer support.
But putting this into practice requires managers who can have those honest conversations. And most managers haven’t been taught how to do that. So you end up needing to train the leaders before they can guide their teams’ growth. It’s complicated and messy and won’t slot into standard learning schedules.
Assessment issues compound the difficulties. We measure program happiness metrics and participation numbers because they’re simple to record. But these don’t indicate if performance improved. Real impact measurement takes months, sometimes years, and requires monitoring real job performance improvements.
Organisations committed to learning create complete measurement frameworks. They measure whether people are applying new skills, whether group performance enhances, whether business outcomes change. It’s tougher effort but identifies genuine impact versus budget consumption.
How do we move forward? If you’re managing workplace learning programs, start by auditing what you’re currently doing. Not the feedback ratings. The real results. Are people doing things differently because of the training they received? Are organisational results getting better? Be brutally honest about what’s working and what isn’t.
Then commence with limited scope. Pick one specific skill gap that needs addressing and design a program that lets them practice those skills in real work situations with assistance and input. Monitor impact genuinely. Build from there.
The future of professional development isn’t in conference centres and corporate training facilities. It’s in creating workplaces where learning happens naturally, continuously, and purposefully. But that requires changing most of our traditional methods.
That’s likely why companies will continue investing in expensive training programs.