Why most training does not stick, and what to do about it
Everybody enjoys the two days. Nothing changes. Nobody says so. The failure is usually designed in before the course starts.
1 September 2026/6 minute read
Ask a manager six weeks after a course what changed and you will usually get a pause, then something about how good the facilitator was. That pause is the whole problem. The course was judged on the experience of attending it, which is the one thing that has no bearing on whether it was worth the money.
The failure is almost never the two days themselves. It is decided earlier, when somebody chose a course title instead of naming an outcome. A title is a category. An outcome is a sentence: after this, a supervisor should be able to run a disciplinary hearing without phoning HR. You can test the second one. You cannot test the first.
The second common failure is sending one person. An individual who comes back with a new method and no colleague who shares it will revert inside a month, because the surrounding process has not moved. If the capability matters, send the group, or run it in-house so the group is the room.
The third is the gap between the course and the work. Generic case studies are comfortable and forgettable. Delegates who spend the second afternoon applying the method to their own contract, their own risk register, their own reporting pack, leave with something already half done rather than a folder of intentions.
There is a fourth failure that providers rarely raise, because it costs us the sale. Sometimes the gap is not a skills gap at all. It is a process wearing a training costume: the reason nobody follows the procedure is that the procedure is wrong, or nobody is accountable for it, or the system makes the right thing slower than the wrong thing. No course fixes that, and a provider who takes the booking anyway has taken your money to postpone the real conversation.
So the questions worth asking before you buy anything: what should somebody be able to do afterwards that they cannot do now, who else needs to be able to do it, what will they practise on, and is training actually the constraint. A provider who cannot answer those with you is selling you a room.