Imagine learners who actively build new skills every day rather than waiting for your annual course. Where instead of one-size-fits-all, learning isn’t only personalized to age, background, and role, but to the skill level, a learner is at, the goals they have set, and the projects in front of them. Where feedback that someone doesn’t know something or isn’t able to do something yet is not read as a failure of the individual, but a delivery gap on your part.

It’s possible. And you can start today.

Embed Learning Into Daily Work, Not Around It

The main issue in training is not motivation as one might think. Rather, it’s the context-switching that needs to occur in traditional training processes. When learning takes place in a different environment, at a different time than the actual work, people tend to forget what they learned and are less likely to apply it in practice.

With just-in-time learning, training content is accessible within the software tools your team is already using on a day-to-day basis. Whether that’s their project management tool, CRM system, or communication application, your team can reference training materials exactly at the moment they are encountering a question or problem. This kind of immediate application is key to solidifying learning.

Short and focused microlearning modules are especially effective for just-in-time learning as they can be easily integrated into the workflow. A quick 5-minute training video or tutorial is much easier to access exactly when you need it compared to a 50-minute training session. And, importantly, these bite-sized modules are also easier to update regularly, which is crucial to keeping training materials relevant when skills and job requirements are constantly changing.

Use The Right Technology Infrastructure

You cannot update training using old tools. This is why many L&D efforts fail – the plan is good, but the tool is not adequate.

If you are assessing what kind of technology your setup requires, considering your AI tech stack for employee training would be a good way to get started. AI-based systems can automate personalization of content; they can notify you when specific employees are not keeping up with the training, and they can create performance-based assessments. This requires a very different system capability compared to one that only hosts a couple of video lessons and keeps a record of who has accessed them.

Compliance training is a solid example. It is obligatory, requires records, and must be tracked. If your current system can do all of that but little else, you get the idea of what you might lack.

Measure What Training Actually Changes, Not Just Who Completed It

It is simple to get completion rates and they are also irrelevant for the most part. The real question is not whether your team has completed a module but whether they start doing their jobs differently. That is a harder metric to track, but it is the one that really shows whether the investment in training has resulted in positive business outcomes. And, as a result, it is what L&D management is increasingly under pressure to report. In the 2024 Workplace Learning Report by LinkedIn, measuring the alignment of learning programs to business goals emerges as the top priority globally for L&D professionals.

Don’t Neglect Durable Skills While Chasing Technical Ones

It’s tempting to think of training as just teaching people to use a new tool – whether that’s a piece of software, a new compliance procedure, or updated product instructions. Of course, those are important aspects of training. But they’re also the parts that are the easiest to let technology handle. Why spend thousands sending people to a training day if all they need to do is learn a new interface?

Doing that – focusing only on providing training for the things that are easiest to teach – is a track straight to being replaced by a machine. Because the characteristics most likely to stay uniquely human are also the hardest to teach – and the easiest to lump under a heading like ‘critical thinking’ or ‘creativity’.

A real training program – one aimed at developing people who perform brilliantly, and keep on doing so – blocks out time, often away from the work environment, for learning and introspection. This takes advantage of the fact that human brains are not simply wetware waiting to be imprinted with a new software build. We think and learn best when we have the time and space to do so.

Automate The Administration So Someone Can Actually Think

Registration, reminders, certification monitoring, renewal timetables – all of this can be done without a person determining the process. It only necessitates a doer, and in the majority of organizations, those are the L&D team.

Automating the administrative processes of training does not diminish the function itself. Instead, it allows the individuals in charge of it to concentrate on what really necessitates their expertise: what skills will be needed by the business the following year, assessing the effectiveness of the current curriculum, and identifying the largest gaps that are emerging.

Well-managed training represents a competitive edge. The companies who view it this way have already advanced beyond using spreadsheets.