The professional development trap: More training, less impact

Better development isn’t more learning. It’s the right learning. Employees don’t need another library of options, writes Mike Erlin.

Professional development has never been more accessible. Learning platforms are packed with courses. Leadership programs are multiplying. Every second organisation has a capability academy, a coaching framework, or a new suite of micro-learning modules designed to keep people growing.

And yet, something isn’t working.

Despite the explosion of learning opportunities, many employees still feel underprepared for the realities of their roles, and capability gaps stubbornly remain, even when training hours and budgets increase.

In my view, the problem isn’t that people don’t want to learn. The problem is that much of what we call professional development has become disconnected from what employees actually need to do each day.

We’ve ended up with a workforce that is over-trained, but under-equipped.

Learning has become busy, not useful.

Most employees aren’t short on development options. They’re drowning in them.

There are workshops, webinars, internal programs, external certifications, on-demand courses, conferences, lunch-and-learns and leadership pathways, all designed with the best possible intent. But for many people, especially those in high-pressure environments, this training often feels like something to add to a growing to-do list, rather than something that genuinely helps them do their job better.

The result is a learning experience that can be oddly demotivating. People complete the modules, sit through the sessions and collect credentials. Then Monday arrives, and the actual work still feels just as hard.

That’s the moment learning stops being energising and starts being exhausting.

Professional development shouldn’t feel like homework. It should feel like help.

We’ve confused learning activity with learning outcomes.

One of the biggest reasons this happens is that learning has become easy to deliver and hard to measure. When we can’t clearly quantify the impact of development on performance, we default to what we can measure: participation metrics.

We track completion rates and celebrate attendance. We report satisfaction scores. We talk about engagement, and ultimately, we measure volume, because volume is visible.

But completion is not the same as capability.

It’s entirely possible for a learning program to be popular and polished, while still making very little difference to what employees can do in their role.

Generic training fails because roles aren’t generic.

At the heart of this issue is role relevance.

A huge amount of professional development is designed at a high level. It focuses on broad themes like communication, resilience, influence, leadership presence, stakeholder management and strategic thinking. These topics sound universally useful, because they often are.

But what gets missed is this: even so-called “universal” skills look completely different depending on the role, the team, the environment and the pressure level.

Take communication, for example.

For one person, it’s about simplifying complex information and presenting it to senior leaders. For another, it’s about managing conflict calmly in a frontline team. For someone else, it’s about setting expectations with clients under pressure. For a people leader, it might mean coaching through uncertainty and motivating a tired team. For a project manager, it might mean influencing without authority and keeping stakeholders aligned.

In every case, the label is the same: “communication”. But the real performance requirement is completely different.

When professional development isn’t designed with this kind of role precision, people end up with content that’s interesting but hard to apply. It can feel inspiring in theory, yet frustratingly irrelevant in practice.

The uncomfortable truth: development doesn’t work the same for everyone.

There’s another layer to this, and it’s one that organisations don’t always want to acknowledge.

Even when two people go through the same training program, with the same motivation, the same intent and the same level of effort, the outcomes are not equal.

One person applies the skill naturally. It fits how they operate. They rely on it instinctively, especially under pressure.

The other applies it with effort. It feels forced. Over time, application fades – not because the skill isn’t understood, but because it doesn’t align with how they naturally work.

The difference isn’t motivation or intelligence. It’s capability alignment.

Skills deliver ROI when they align with an individual’s underlying capability. When they don’t, application decays – regardless of effort, quality of instruction, or intent. This is why training outcomes vary so widely, even in well-designed programs.

Why capability visibility matters

In many organisations, learning and development still operates with a key blind spot: a lack of clear, structured visibility into capability. That means organisations can’t confidently answer questions like:

• What capabilities actually drive success in this role in our environment?
• Which skills gaps matter most right now?
• Who is likely to benefit most from which development?
• Where are we building on strengths versus forcing change against a person’s natural capability profile?
• What kind of ROI is realistic, and what will require ongoing support?

Without those answers, professional development becomes expensive guesswork. The organisation delivers more content, hoping something lands. Employees complete training, hoping it makes work easier. HR teams report on participation because it’s the only thing that’s consistently measurable.

But learning strategies only improve when they’re aligned.

Align learning to outcomes.

If we want to fix the learning experience and improve performance at the same time, we need to stop starting with training and instead start with clarity.

That means getting specific about what success looks like in the role, team, or environment, and then grounding development in a clear understanding of what the work actually demands.

Capability intelligence doesn’t replace skills development. It makes skills investment more precise, more targeted, and more measurable.

A more effective approach begins with three practical shifts.

1) Start with role outcomes, not generic competencies

Instead of asking, “What training should we offer?” start with, “What does success in this role require?”

This means defining real outcomes and behaviours – not broad capability labels – and building learning around the actual challenges people face in context.

2) Diagnose capability before prescribing development

One-size-fits-all learning assumes that every employee needs the same input to produce the same output. That simply isn’t how performance works.

Development becomes far more effective when we understand both sides of the equation:

• What the role requires.
• What capabilities the person already brings.

That’s where professional development becomes targeted, realistic, and far more likely to stick.

3) Measure application, not consumption

If we only measure completion, we’ll continue designing learning that is easy to complete, but hard to apply.

If we measure behavioural application, such as what people do differently, more confidently, and more consistently as a result of learning, we start designing development that actually changes performance.

Not every outcome can be perfectly quantified, but the focus matters. What changes after the training? What becomes easier? What improves? What decisions become better? What problems resolve faster?

Better development isn’t more learning. It’s the right learning.

Employees don’t need another library of options.

They need development that feels relevant, actionable, and connected to the realities of their work. They need learning that’s designed for the role they’re in and the capabilities they bring, not the role imagined in a generic framework.

The future of professional development isn’t about more content, more platforms, or more initiatives. It’s about better alignment between what people learn and what they do every day.

Because when learning is role-relevant, it stops being an obligation and starts becoming what it was always supposed to be: a pathway to better performance, stronger confidence, and real growth.

Mike Erlin is a co-founder and CEO of AbilityMap.