Why Most Professional Development Training is Broken (And the Three Things That Actually Work)
Look, I’m about to rile up a lot of people in the corporate training world. About 80% of corporate training is fancy nonsense. There , I said it.
After 17 years of conducting professional development workshops from Melbourne to Brisbane, and I reckon about three quarters of corporate training programs these days is just expensive box-ticking exercises that make HR departments feel good about their budgets.
Not long ago 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. Trust falls! In 2025! I asked the participants what they’d learned that they could use 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 seasoned workers with real duties. We squeeze them into training rooms, show them presentations full of corporate buzzwords (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 real development occurs in classroom settings. Wrong. Dead wrong. Genuine skill development happens on the job. It happens when a senior workmate explains how the approval process actually works. It happens when someone gets real time feedback on how to handle tricky conversations.
I learned this the hard way about eight years ago. Was running these complex two-day leadership intensives. Lots of group exercises, simulation activities, action plans that participants would write on poster boards and display around the room. Felt very significant. Very complete.
Then I started following up six months later. Know what I found? Nobody was doing anything differently. The materials ended up in desk drawers never to be seen again.
I finally understood we had it completely the wrong way around.
Don’t misunderstand me, training can work. Companies like Salesforce and HubSpot have shown that when you get professional development right, it transforms entire cultures. But they’re not doing team building exercises. They’re doing something completely different.
The first thing that actually works? Brief skill-building sessions tackling current problems. No more than half an hour. One specific skill. Used straight away. I’ve seen teams learn sophisticated project management software this way when traditional full-day courses failed completely.
Next approach: peer-to-peer knowledge transfer programs. Not mentoring (that’s too formal and often doesn’t work). I’m talking about structured ways for experienced people to share what they know with workmates who need those exact skills. Works brilliantly when you get rid of the management overhead and just let people teach each other.
Finally: what I call “learning laboratories.” Small groups tackling real workplace challenges together over several weeks. No external consultant running sessions. No prescribed outcomes. Just smart people working through actual problems and documenting what they learn.
This is where things get really telling. The resistance to this approach usually comes from internal learning teams. They’ve invested so much in conventional training approaches that admitting it doesn’t work feels like career destruction. Fair enough. It’s frightening when your livelihood relies on outdated methods.
Also, let’s be honest about something else. Certain individuals actually like passive learning environments rather than driving their professional growth. It’s easier. Less confronting. You can scroll through emails, pretend to pay attention, and still claim youre “growing your skills.”
Businesses doing this well know that development isn’t something that happens once. It’s embedded in daily work. It’s baked into how work gets done, not something that happens separate from work.
Take Westpac’s approach to upskilling their branch managers. Instead of classroom sessions about customer service excellence, they paired veteran team leads with junior managers for real customer interactions. Skill building took place in real situations, with instant feedback and correction. Customer satisfaction scores in participating branches jumped 23% within four months.
Now I know what you’re thinking. “But what about compliance training? What about mandatory OH&S sessions?” Fair point. Certain programs are required by law whether they’re interesting or not. But even then, you can make it applicable and practical instead of mind-numbing slide shows.
What’s fundamentally wrong with workplace training is it addresses effects rather than root issues. Employee engagement scores are low? Send them to a motivation workshop! Issues with collaboration? Team building sessions for the entire organisation! But if your company culture is toxic, no amount of training will fix it.
I’ve seen this play out dozens of times. 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 uncertainty about job security. Training can’t fix strategic mistakes.
Let me share an awkward truth: not everyone needs to be developed. Some people are perfectly happy doing their current job well and have no interest in additional responsibilities or skills. The whole “everyone must be continuously learning” mentality creates pointless pressure and wastes resources that could be better used on workers actively seeking development.
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 specifically hope to achieve. 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 the bulk of team leaders lack these conversation skills. So you end up needing to develop the managers before they can effectively support everyone else’s development. It’s complex and messy and doesn’t fit neatly into quarterly training calendars.
The measurement problem makes everything worse. We measure program happiness metrics and participation numbers because they’re easy to track. But neither tells you whether someone actually got better at their job. Real impact measurement takes months, sometimes years, and requires following genuine ability enhancements.
Companies that take professional development seriously invest in long-term tracking systems. They measure whether individuals use their training, whether collaborative effectiveness increases, whether organisational results shift. It’s tougher effort but identifies genuine impact versus budget consumption.
How do we move forward? If you’re responsible for professional development in your organisation, start by examining your current approaches. Not the satisfaction scores. The real results. Are people using new skills from their development programs? Are company performance enhancing? Be brutally honest about what’s working and what isn’t.
Then commence with limited scope. Pick one area where people need to develope specific skills and design a program that lets them apply new capabilities in actual job contexts with guidance and coaching. Track outcomes accurately. Grow the program systematically.
The future of professional development isn’t in conference centres and corporate training facilities. It’s in building environments where development occurs organically, constantly, and meaningfully. But that requires rethinking pretty much everything we currently do.
That’s likely why companies will continue investing in costly training programs.