Why Nearly All Professional Development Training Is Still Missing the Point (And What Actually Works)
Picture this: pricey leadership course, room full of managers, and half the audience is mentally somewhere else. Fair dinkum, I couldn’t blame him. We were getting lectured about strategic thinking by someone who clearly had not updated their material since the Howard government. Twenty-plus years in this industry across every major Australian city, I’ve seen this same worn-out formula repeated everywhere from manufacturing plants in Adelaide to creative agencies in Fitzroy.
What genuinely winds me up is this: billions spent on development programs that develop nothing but the trainer’s retirement fund.
Most training programs are built backwards. They start with what the training company wants to sell rather than what your people really need to learn. Time and again, I meet learning and development teams obsessing over program graduations while their star employees are updating their LinkedIn profiles.
The dirty little secret? About 73% of professional development initiatives fail to create lasting behavioural change. I pulled that figure out of thin air, but anyone who’s worked in corporate Australia knows it’s probably conservative.
Let me tell you about Sarah from a logistics company I worked with in 2019. Smart operations manager, 15 years experience, could solve problems that would make your head spin. Her company sent her to a three-day “Strategic Thinking for Leaders” course that cost them $forty five hundred bucks. Everything she learned was theoretical nonsense with zero relevance to her actual job challenges. Sarah came back more frustrated than when she left.
That’s the first problem. We’ve industrialized learning.
Professional development is now an off-the-shelf product that rarely fits anyone’s real needs. You get the same recycled content whether you’re managing a team of tradespeople or leading a finance department. Imagine walking into a clothing store where everything comes in one size. Sometimes it works. Usually it doesn’t.
The next huge flaw is when this training actually happens. Training gets scheduled around budget cycles and conference room availability, not when people actually need help. Course participants are selected by what’s written on their business card, not what keeps them awake at night.
There was this factory in regional Victoria that decided every supervisor needed the same communication course. Some of these fellas had been leading people since before mobile phones existed. The rest were fresh promotions who broke into a sweat at the thought of performance reviews. Guess which group got the best value?
Here’s where I might lose some of you: I think most soft skills training is a waste of money.
These abilities are vital, but our approach to teaching them is fundamentally flawed. You cannot teach someone to be a better leader by showing them a video about active listening. Imagine learning to play cricket by studying the rule book.
Genuine learning occurs when people are dealing with real problems in real time. The training that actually works focuses on problems people are losing sleep over. None of this artificial simulation garbage. Actual problems that affected the bottom line.
This approach makes training managers nervous because it’s harder to measure and control. Everyone wants measurable outcomes and completion certificates. But learning doesn’t happen in neat boxes.
These days I turn down anyone asking for off-the-shelf training solutions. If you want standard, hire someone else. Everything I design is custom-built for the actual problems your team faces every day.
Take feedback skills, for example. Most companies assume their leaders are terrible at performance discussions. But a construction foreman giving feedback to a new apprentice about safety procedures is completely different from a marketing manager discussing campaign performance with their creative team. The context, the relationship, the entire communication approach is worlds apart.
The biggest issue might be what comes next – which is usually sweet FA.
Development finishes when the Zoom call ends. Nobody follows up, nobody checks in, nobody provides ongoing help. It’s like going to the gym once and expecting to get fit.
I know a retail company that dropped serious money on service skills development. Half a year later, secret shoppers couldn’t detect any difference in how customers were treated. The program itself wasn’t terrible. Nobody provided ongoing coaching or practice opportunities.
Here’s an uncomfortable truth: training professionals often don’t understand how businesses actually work.
They know how to facilitate workshops and design learning materials. They understand how to make training sessions engaging and memorable. They’ve never had to fire someone, chase overdue payments, or explain poor results to a board.
This disconnect shows up in training content that sounds great in theory but falls apart when people try to use it in their actual jobs. Actual work life is chaotic and unpredictable in ways that training rarely addresses.
The companies getting real value from professional development are doing a few things differently.
Point one: they know exactly what problem they’re trying to solve. Not “better leadership” but “reduce project delays caused by poor team communication”. They skip broad goals like “enhanced communication” and target “decrease project rework by 30%”.
The second key is getting immediate managers on board. Direct managers shape your skills more than any workshop or seminar. But most organisations treat managers like they’re obstacles to development rather than partners in it.
Point three: they track what people actually do differently, not how they felt about the training. Satisfaction surveys are meaningless if behaviour stays the same.
Telstra’s approach integrates learning directly into daily work instead of treating it as a separate activity. Staff develop skills while tackling actual business challenges with expert guidance.
Traditional training isn’t completely worthless. Hands-on technical training delivers results when it’s properly structured. Workplace safety education prevents accidents and deaths. Compliance training keeps you out of legal trouble.
Interpersonal development – the stuff most companies desperately lack – demands an entirely new method.
The next generation of professional development mirrors old-school apprenticeships rather than classroom sessions. Staff developing skills through actual work projects with mentoring and progressively harder challenges.
This approach requires admitting that learning is chaotic, personal, and slow. It requires training supervisors to develop people, not just assign tasks. Success gets measured by meaningful outcomes instead of convenient metrics.
Many companies resist this change because it means acknowledging their existing training investment has been largely wasted. It’s easier to book another workshop and hope for different results.
But the companies that figure this out will have a massive competitive advantage. They’ll grow capabilities quicker, keep good people longer, and see genuine returns on training spend.
The rest will keep wondering why their expensive training programs are not creating the changes they need.
Your call.
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