How to Avoid Workplace Leadership & Development Challenges

Workplace training benefits both employers and employees

When created effectively, workplace training has the potential to lift up both employees and employers in numerous ways. Employees not only get stronger at their jobs—they can also tap into greater career opportunities and job satisfaction through their skill development. Employers, meanwhile, benefit from much more than just productive employees. Often, after investing in their learning environment, companies see higher levels of employee retention.

When creating training content, teams can often succumb to common pitfalls that reduce the impact of these programs. But by building out a training strategy that acknowledges these challenges and moves past them, workplaces can harness the true value of learning and development.

For more strategies to build excellent training programs, check out The No Excuses Guide to Effective E‑Learning.

What is the opportunity cost of neglecting workplace training programs? 

Today’s employees must be more agile than ever. Even the most qualified hires will likely need to learn new skills on the job as priorities change and technology evolves. This is where workplace training programs come in. 

By investing in your company’s learning initiatives in the right ways, you don’t just boost employee skills. You can tap into a wealth of benefits from increased employee retention to reduced on-the-job errors, greater opportunities for employee development, higher employee engagement, and a stronger company reputation.

While great training lifts up your entire organization, the cost of ineffective training can be monumental. Morale can suffer, error rates can rise, and employees might leave—all chipping away at your company’s culture, and at your bottom line.

10 employee training challenges and how to avoid them

While every workplace encounters unique challenges, there are ten common issues that arise when creating training initiatives. Below, we’ll dive into each one, then equip you with strategies for success.

1. Training materials aren’t challenging enough

In order for real learning to take place, your training sessions should challenge learners to think critically and apply their skills. If training is too easy, learners miss out on the opportunity to engage with the information, and may be less likely to acquire new skills and knowledge.

Solution: Keep learners on their toes

Every type of training has the power to challenge learners and create real opportunities for learning. To create challenging training that results in true learning, consult subject matter experts to inform your content and break down complex topics. From there, make sure any knowledge checks and quizzes hit at the right level of difficulty so learners are progressing in their knowledge.
For example, Aptive wanted to challenge learners with compliance training that truly prepared them for the complex scenarios that arise in their field of government contracting. By creating checkpoints that made learners pause, reflect, and even retry answers when necessary, they were able to create a course that was praised for its difficulty level and achieved a 5-star rating in their LMS.

2. Training methods are boring

Proper training shouldn’t feel like an activity that employees can do mindlessly—rather, they should be engaged and present as they progress through it. Boring training is easy to tune out, creating a huge missed opportunity for learning to take place.

Solution: Create opportunities for engagement

Making your training entertaining and engaging makes it far more memorable for your audience. Consider strategies like e-learning gamification, where elements of game theory are applied to online courses, to make learning fun and capture learners’ attention. 
Throughout your course, you can also weave in opportunities for learners to interact with content. For example, drag-and-drop activities require learners to click and make choices along the way.

3. Training is one-size-fits-all when it shouldn’t be

While some training can remain the same for different roles or types of learners, many types of workplace training benefit from customization. When training that should be tailored is the same for every learner, nuance is neglected, making training less effective and relevant.

Solution: Customize training for different roles

To make sure training is effective for different types of learners, customize it for different roles. Work with team leaders to identify learning priorities for separate teams. With branching scenarios, you can build in customized learning paths for different groups within the same course. This helps ensure that different types of learners can all get value out of a course by seeing slightly different variations of the same online training.

4. Training isn’t flexible enough

Inflexibility is a massive training challenge that can hinder learning and participation. When training opportunities don’t fit into employees’ daily lives, they can become a nuisance, making it harder to achieve real learning.

Solution: Leverage e-learning software

Even if your office operates exclusively in-person, e-learning can be a powerful tool for increasing the flexibility of your training. With e-learning, employees can take on-the-job training on their own time rather than having to sit through a live course or presentation.

5. Training isn’t mobile-ready

Despite accounting for 80 percent of workers worldwide, deskless workers are continually underserved when it comes to effective training. Whether they’re frontline technicians in the field, manufacturing workers on the assembly line, delivery drivers behind the wheel, or retail associates attending to customers, training needs to meet them where they are. 

Solution: Leverage mobile learning

Mobile learning takes place on a mobile device, like a tablet or smartphone. Paired with microlearning modules—which deliver bite-sized learning experiences that drive retention—mobile learning reaches frontline, remote, and deskless workers exactly when and where they need. 

6. Training is AI-dominated instead of AI-assisted

Integrating AI into training programs requires a thoughtful, intentional approach. It can be tempting to let AI take over the whole process—from course creation to distribution and tracking—but the human element in learning and development needs to be in the driver’s seat. 

Solution: Leverage AI as a co-pilot, not a driver

Powerful AI tools can help accelerate course creation, convert old source material, generate high-quality images, and change your writing tone and style to improve readability. When used in the capacity of an assistant, the human element—understanding the nuances of your audience, aligning learning with your organization’s business goals, and staying within ethical boundaries—can remain in the driver’s seat. 

7. Training doesn’t cultivate continuous learning

Too often, employees only encounter learning experiences at the beginning of their journey, during preboarding or onboarding. They may participate in the occasional soft skills or leadership training down the road, but if continuous learning isn’t embedded into their workflow, it isn’t valued. 

Solution: Embed learning into daily workflow

There’s a fine line between making learning a priority and overwhelming employees with what might seem like a distraction to their daily workflow. This necessitates that learning—when it is distributed—must be relevant, applicable, and engaging. Take the word “daily” lightly. Embed learning into daily workflow as needed, not by default. For example, a microlearning module on fulfilling online orders can be prompted by the employee directly within the point of sale system. 

8. Training ROI isn’t measured

At some point, L&D pros are asked by executives to prove the ROI of their training initiatives. Without the proper metrics in place to show the true impact of learning—both short term and long term—budget cuts may darken the learning and development doorstep. 

Solution: Leverage learning measurement metrics

Clearly showing how training aligns with business goals means tracking performance outcomes like productivity metrics, common KPIs, and time-to-competency for new hires. Cost efficiency metrics like cost per learner and training ROI help to compare the benefits of training to the investment made. 

9. Training needs aren’t analyzed

Without implementing a proper training needs analysis, time and money spent on course creation may be a waste. Your learner’s actual needs are unmet, skill and knowledge gaps are left uncovered, and training modules come across as irrelevant, confusing, and tiresome. 

Solution: Conduct a 3-part training needs analysis

A proper training needs analysis has three parts: needs, audience, and task analysis. The needs analysis uncovers skill or knowledge gaps and determines whether or not training is actually the answer. An audience analysis helps you understand learner needs and preferences. And a task analysis identifies the actual process that training needs to address. Together, these three analyses ensure training initiatives are relevant, timely, and engaging. 

10. Training isn’t accessible to all learners

When employees encounter barriers to learning, engagement and retention drop dramatically. Ensuring that your e-learning courses are accessible to all learners—regardless of skill, ability, or demographic—is of the utmost importance. 

Solution: Implement accessibility and localization standards

Especially important for organizations with a global workforce, localization modifies content for any audience through text translation and cultural adaptation. Accessibility standards ensure that tools like screen readers, speech-to-text applications, keyboard navigation, and adjustable pacing are available for those with visual, auditory, physical, and mental disabilities.

For best-in-class training programs, foster a culture of continuous learning

By following the strategies above to avoid common training pitfalls, you can build learning into your company’s values. A true learning culture encourages all employees to seek constant improvement, bettering themselves and the organization in the process.

Solicit employee feedback on the way, incorporate it strategically, and aim for continuous improvement as your program grows and evolves over time. In doing so, you can harness the true potential of workplace training, lifting up your employees and your bottom line in the process. 

For more insights on how to create e-learning that achieves real results, read The No Excuses Guide to Effective E‑Learning.