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Why Your Company's Training ROI is Poor (And It's Not What You Think)

Three months ago, our finance director cornered me at the Christmas party with a spreadsheet. "Look at this," he said, jabbing his finger at the numbers. "We spent $340,000 on training last year. Show me where that money went."

I couldn't. And neither can most of you.

After twenty-two years in workplace training and consulting across Melbourne, Sydney, and Perth, I've watched companies throw money at learning and development like they're feeding coins into a broken poker machine. The problem isn't that training doesn't work - it's that we're measuring the wrong bloody things.

The Metrics That Don't Matter

Most organisations measure training success by completion rates, satisfaction scores, and knowledge retention tests. These metrics tell you absolutely nothing about business impact. It's like judging a restaurant by how quickly people finish their meals rather than whether they come back.

Last year, I worked with a mining company in Western Australia that bragged about their 98% completion rate for safety training. Impressive, right? Wrong. Their incident reports were still climbing, and site supervisors told me the training was "complete rubbish" that didn't reflect real working conditions.

The real issue? They were measuring compliance, not competence.

Here's what actually matters: behaviour change in the workplace, measurable performance improvements, and long-term skill application. But tracking these requires more effort than most HR departments want to invest.

The 90-Day Window Problem

Training transfer - that's the fancy term for whether people actually use what they learn - has a shelf life shorter than milk left in a hot car. Research shows that without reinforcement, 87% of new skills disappear within 90 days. Yet most companies treat training like a one-and-done vaccination.

I remember working with emotional intelligence training programs for a client in Brisbane. Brilliant content, engaging facilitator, positive feedback. Six months later? Middle management was still having the same conflicts, making the same poor decisions, treating their teams like machinery instead of humans.

The problem wasn't the training. It was the complete absence of follow-up, coaching, or any attempt to embed the skills into daily work practices.

The Generic Training Trap

Cookie-cutter training programs are the fast food of professional development. Cheap, convenient, and ultimately unsatisfying. Yet companies keep buying off-the-shelf solutions that promise to fix everything from communication issues to leadership gaps.

Here's an uncomfortable truth: most generic training programs are designed for American corporate culture, not Australian workplaces. The case studies reference companies we've never heard of, the communication styles don't match our directness, and the leadership models assume hierarchies that don't exist in many Aussie businesses.

I've seen teams in Adelaide struggle through presentation skills workshops that taught them to be overly formal and scripted. These people work in environments where authenticity and straight talk are valued over polished corporate speak. The training actually made them less effective communicators.

The Timing Disaster

Companies love scheduling training during the busiest periods. It's like deciding to renovate your kitchen during Christmas dinner preparations. I've lost count of how many times I've delivered workshops to people checking emails, taking calls, and mentally planning their escape back to urgent projects.

When participants are stressed, distracted, or resentful about being pulled away from critical work, they retain almost nothing. The timing kills any chance of meaningful learning before it starts.

Smart organisations schedule training during natural lulls, integrate it with existing workflows, or use it as a reward rather than an interruption. But this requires planning beyond next quarter's budget cycle.

The Manager Bypass

Here's where most training initiatives die: middle management. You can deliver the most brilliant communication training to front-line staff, but if their managers don't model or reinforce the skills, you've wasted everyone's time.

I worked with a retail chain that invested heavily in customer service training for their floor staff. Beautiful program, comprehensive materials, practical exercises. But the store managers were still focused purely on sales targets, rushing staff through transactions, and criticising anyone who spent "too much time" with customers.

The training message was completely undermined by daily management behaviour. Staff learned that customer service skills were nice-to-have extras, not core job requirements.

The Real ROI Killers

Lack of Pre-Training Assessment: Most companies don't identify specific skill gaps before training. They assume everyone needs the same development, which is like prescribing the same medication for every patient.

No Clear Success Metrics: If you can't define what success looks like, you can't measure it. Vague goals like "improve communication" are useless. Specific outcomes like "reduce customer complaint escalations by 30%" give you something measurable.

Missing Context: Training delivered in isolation from real work challenges is quickly forgotten. The best programs solve actual problems people face daily, not theoretical scenarios from generic workbooks.

One-Size-Fits-All Delivery: Different people learn differently. Some need hands-on practice, others prefer reflection and analysis. Delivering everything through the same format guarantees you'll miss large portions of your audience.

What Actually Works

The companies getting real ROI from training do three things differently:

First, they link training directly to business problems. Instead of generic leadership development, they focus on specific challenges like reducing team turnover or improving project delivery times.

Second, they build reinforcement into the process. Coaching sessions, peer discussion groups, and manager check-ins extend learning beyond the initial workshop. They treat training as a process, not an event.

Third, they measure behaviour change, not just knowledge acquisition. They track whether people actually apply new skills and whether those applications create measurable business improvements.

I've seen this work brilliantly with a construction company in Melbourne that was struggling with safety incidents. Instead of more compliance training, they focused on improving communication between supervisors and crews. They measured the number of safety discussions, quality of hazard reporting, and near-miss reporting rates.

Result? A 40% reduction in incidents within six months, plus improved team relationships and job satisfaction.

The Technology Trap

Don't get me started on learning management systems that prioritise tracking over learning. These platforms excel at generating reports about who clicked what, but they're terrible at creating meaningful educational experiences.

The worst part? Companies become addicted to the data these systems provide, even when it tells them nothing useful about actual learning outcomes. They celebrate high completion rates while performance problems persist.

Stop Measuring Busy Work

Training ROI fails because we measure activity instead of impact. Hours completed, courses attended, certificates earned - these metrics make training departments look busy without proving they're effective.

Real ROI measurement requires patience and discipline. You need baseline performance data, clear improvement targets, and the willingness to track changes over months, not weeks.

Most companies aren't willing to invest in proper measurement because it's harder than counting completions. But without it, you're shooting in the dark with expensive ammunition.

The Bottom Line

Your training ROI is poor because you're treating learning like a commodity instead of an investment. You're buying programs instead of solving problems, measuring compliance instead of competence, and hoping for magic instead of managing for results.

The solution isn't better training providers or fancier technology. It's fundamentally changing how you approach workplace learning - from one-off events to ongoing processes, from generic content to specific problem-solving, from activity metrics to business impact measurement.

Until you do that, you'll keep asking where your training budget went instead of celebrating where it took your business.

Fix the measurement, and the ROI will follow. Keep measuring the wrong things, and you'll keep getting the wrong results.

Simple as that.