The Issue with Employee Training Programs is Missed Opportunity

But compliance isn’t a proactive way to approach L&D, especially when L&D is so crucial for leadership training, professional development, and maintaining institutional knowledge.

What you need to do is make employee training matter. That means creating training that’s both meaningful and impactful to employees’ day-to-day actions and behaviors.

Sounds easier said than done, right? In this blog, we’ll dive into how you can create meaningful learning opportunities for employees by linking learning and performance.

What does employee training mean? 

Employee training is the structured process of developing employees’ technical and personal skills, knowledge, behaviors, tools, and processes to improve performance, align their contributions with organizational goals, and ensure they’re equipped to meet the evolving requirements of their roles.  

It’s a crucial part of L&D, performance management, and even building company culture. Employee training covers a wide spectrum, from onboarding new hires to leadership development and even diversity training. 

The problem with traditional employee training 

Traditional employee training programs often tend to miss development opportunities—and a lot of organizations don’t even know this is happening. For many businesses, L&D is more of a checkbox to fill in than a proactive and ongoing process to boost employee performance.  

That means training programs often become a “one-size-fits-all” kind of deal where training efforts lack personalization and employees’ capability gaps don’t get addressed. When capability gaps aren’t addressed, employees don’t develop the capabilities they need to effectively perform their roles, they disengage (and, if it’s really bad, employee turnover). 

Let’s not forget a lot of companies struggle to link learning and performance initiatives, despite the fact 89.9% of businesses agree that measuring employee growth with capabilities is a key driver for business performance. When you’re not using capabilities to tie learning to performance outcomes, you’re missing capability gaps that could be targeted with development programs. 

Done right, you can integrate performance data with learning paths to create personalized training programs for employee development. Done wrong (or not done at all) and you have no way of reliably providing performance evaluations or a relevant learning experience to your learners. And without reliable feedback or follow up (be that from performance reviews or general check-ins) employees likely won’t be retaining or applying anything they learn. 

5 steps to align employee training with performance  

Look, we get it. Stating the end result (capability building) is a lot easier than working out the journey (capability development). But it doesn’t have to be as daunting as it sounds.  

In fact, you can align employee training with performance in five simple steps: 

1. Identify capability gaps 

2. Set clear training goals linked to business strategy 

3. Develop personalized learning paths 

4. Provide continuous feedback and support 

5. Measure impact. 

These steps are a lot easier to perform with the right technology, such as a performance learning management system (PLMS). It can streamline the capability building process from start to finish by running performance and capability assessments, as well as managing, delivering, and tracking employee training. 

Step 1: Identify capability gaps 

When we say capability gaps, we mean the knowledge gaps between your current capabilities and the capabilities you need. These capabilities are derived from business strategy and mapped to individual job roles, so they’ll be specific to the needs of your business and its roles. 

Use a capability gap analysis here. It’s a simple 3-step process of: 

1. Analyzing your current capabilities. 

2. Evaluating capabilities needed for your desired outcomes 

3. Identifying the gaps between the two. 

The first part is like any performance evaluation, really. You need to assess employees’ capabilities based on their competency (or proficiency). The number of competencies you have—and what you call them—is up to you, but we recommend that you cover emerging, proficient, and advanced levels at the very least. Proficient competence is when employees perform capabilities according to standards, compared to emerging (where employees only have a basic understanding) and advanced competence (where employees have mastered the capability). 

Just remember that low competency isn’t a bad thing. Competency is not a pass/fail grading system, rather a sliding scale of performance. Obviously, an entry-level employee isn’t expected to have an expert-level understanding of leadership skills or business strategy. That’s what career development is for (and that’s why it’s important that your employee training program targets employee goals and growth opportunities). 

A capability gap analysis is part of a continuous training cycle—that means don’t wait until you see obvious gaps in knowledge before you start a development program. It’s a continuous learning process, so you should be doing a gap analysis at regular intervals, from the onboarding process with new employees to when you cultivate future leaders. 

Step 2: Set clear training goals linked to business strategy 

Once you know what your capability gaps are, you should set clear, measurable training objectives that align with organizational goals.  

Don’t overwhelm yourself by setting goals for every single capability gap you’ve identified, though. Some gaps just aren’t immediate strategic priorities, and it would be overkill (and unrealistic) to try and design workplace training for all capability gaps at once. Start by building out a business capability heat map to help with prioritizing training for capabilities that need immediate development vs. capabilities that can wait. 

The goals you set should define specific outcomes expected from the training program and how they’ll improve employee performance in a way that supports broader business priorities and organizational growth. We have three tips for this: 

1. Align training goals with business outcomes like increased sales, customer satisfaction, or improved product quality. These are tangible outcomes you can measure, indicating effective employee training due to increased performance. Hot tip: capabilities give you both the goal and the outcome in one, so they’re ready to go and be measured! 

2. Set SMART objectives (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) for the training program. SMART goals provide an outline for specific outcomes, tangible measures, and milestones that ensure goals are relevant to specific employee (and business) priorities. 

3. Communicate the purpose of training to employees so they understand how it will impact their performance and the company’s success. A big reason change management fails is that employees resist change, usually because it doesn’t seem like a productive use of their time. If they understand the personal value training offers them and how they contribute to the business, then they’re more likely to invest in their own goals. 

Step 3: Develop personalized learning paths 

This is the big one when it comes to making sure you’re providing employees with relevant opportunities. Truly personalizing a development program for an employee starts with performance management, specifically a capability assessment. That reveals which capability gaps you should provide training for, so it just becomes a matter of creating a pathway to close those gaps. 

Personalized training content is a two-pronged approach of: 

1. Assigning relevant content 

2. Providing a variety of training methods. 

By “relevant content”, we mean learning that specifically targets the capabilities you need. If you aren’t sure about what content is mapped to what capabilities, a PLMS does a training needs analysis and maps content to capabilities, so learners only see content relevant to their needs in their development plans.  

Then we come to training methods. Traditional training methods include classroom training and online courses, but that may not be the best way to train for certain capability sets. Soft skills (the personal attributes that enable employees to interact effectively with others) aren’t suited to more formal training sessions. Communication, collaboration, teamwork—these are all better built with experiential learning that focuses on interpersonal skill development. Technical training might benefit from online learning, but more creative capabilities like graphic design for marketing need on-the-job training, mentoring, or coaching. 

Step 4: Provide continuous feedback and support 

The training process shouldn’t be a one-and-done situation. Instead, you should have a continuous learning culture so that employee capabilities never stagnate. Your employees will thank you for it—especially Gen Z workers, who value learning for professional development more than any other generation in the workplace. 

The best way to enable continuous training is through the performance review cycle. Traditionally, performance reviews happen at the end of an annual cycle. That means employees only get feedback once a year, which doesn’t really help those who need immediate support. 

Our answer to this is regular check-ins and one-on-one meetings, say, every week or two. It means managers can help learners stay on track to achieve their goals and complete training by giving them feedback on their progress while training is happening. That goes a long way to increasing employee satisfaction and reducing turnover, because employees feel that they’re getting the support they need to meet their goals and apply training, and they aren’t getting blindsided by negative feedback months after the fact. 

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do formal performance reviews as usual. Scheduled evaluations are still important, because that’s where you’ll conduct a full capability assessment which can be used to build out more tailored development programs for learners (and make sure learning is continuous). 

Step 5: Measure impact 

Don’t just set employee training programs and trust that they’re doing their job. It’s important to measure the impact of training on both individual employee performance and overall organizational outcomes. This is where you’ll be measuring the return on investment (ROI) of training programs, so that you can make data-driven decisions and adjustments to employee training and development programs. 

You need to track your key performance indicators (KPIs) to see how they’ve been impacted by training. For employees, this would be: 

1. Whether their SMART goals were met 

2. How their competency has improved. 

For the business, this includes tangible outcomes like increased revenue, sales, or customer retention. If you provided training to increase your sales team’s skills, then you would expect to see sales increase as a result. And if your customer support team did customer service training, you’d expect to see better customer satisfaction and increased customer retention. These can be measured in hard numbers—so if those numbers aren’t better than they were before training, then your development programs need to be adjusted. 

Key takeaways 

Traditional employee training misses the nuances of individual learners’ needs, and that means employees miss out on development opportunities that would have improved their performance. A successful employee training program does away with the one-size-fits-all approach to training and instead builds personalized development paths for learners. 

Aligning employee training with performance management doesn’t have to be complicated, though. It’s a simple five-step process of: 

1. Identifying and prioritizing capability gaps 

2. Setting clear SMART goals linked to business strategy 

3. Developing personalized learning paths based on goals, strategy, and development needs 

4. Providing continuous feedback and support in lieu of traditional performance management 

5. Measuring the impact of training on employee and business performance. 

It’s all about making sure that what your employees learn translates into real-world improvements in performance that help them and the business thrive.