Australian companies spend billions on training. Why isn’t behaviour changing?

The organisations that win the next decade won’t be the ones that give people access to the most content. They’ll be the ones that help people experiment, apply, reflect, and grow. Information creates awareness, writes Tamsin Simounds.

Australian businesses spent $8 billion on learning and development in 2024, up 15 per cent on the year before. If your role involves organisational development or learning and development, I imagine you’re unsurprised. You might also have experienced the frustration that sits alongside it. The investment goes in, you run the programs, buy tables at conferences, people rate them well on the day, and then not much changes. Most organisations are genuinely trying. But there’s a design problem running through corporate learning at a structural level. The way we set corporate training up, and the way human brains actually learn, don’t line up. We’ve built development almost entirely around the transfer of information. And information, on its own, doesn’t change behaviour.

Why information isn’t enough

Your brain doesn’t update through exposure to ideas. It updates through experience. Your brain is constantly predicting what will happen next based on what it has experienced before. When reality matches the prediction, nothing changes. When it doesn’t, when someone tries something, experiences friction, and the outcome surprises them, the brain pays attention. That’s when learning sticks. Sitting in a room watching a slide deck about psychological safety doesn’t meet that threshold. Reading a framework on feedback doesn’t either. These things inform, but they don’t change.

Gallup’s 2025 State of the Global Workforce data tells this story well. Only 21 per cent of employees globally are engaged at work, the lowest level since the pandemic, at a cost of $438 billion in lost productivity in a single year. At the same time, only 44 per cent of managers globally have received formal management training, despite middle managers accounting for 70 per cent of the variance in team engagement. The spend is there. The outcomes suggest we’re still missing something.

The shift from information to behaviour change isn’t rocket science, but it does require approaching development differently. There’s three things that actually move the needle

1. Your organisation is already full of wisdom. Use it

Before booking another program, look at what’s already inside the building. Stretch opportunities, “intra-gigs”, secondments, mentoring, buddying, project work, and on-the-job experiments will often shift behaviour more than a room full of new content. The difference is experience. When someone steps into a different role, joins a new project, or works alongside a different team, they gather real data about themselves and the organisation. They discover what they’re capable of, where they struggle, and what assumptions no longer hold true.

This visceral and sometimes uncomfortable experience is how the brain updates. The wisdom already exists in your organisation; your only job is creating the conditions for people to access it in a way that aligns with their development goals.

2. Run the program, then test the content

When you do run formal programs, build experimentation into the design itself. At the end of every session, give participants one job: set a hypothesis to test before the next session. The structure I use is simple:

I’ll test [specific behaviour] for [time period] to learn [what happens].

For example:

I’ll test having difficult but necessary conversations within 24 hours for the next four weeks to learn whether they become easier, and how they impact my relationships with the team.

Not a goal, but a test. When participants return, they don’t come back with opinions about the content, but real-life data and stories to discuss. What did they try? What happened? What surprised them? The conversation immediately becomes richer because the learning has moved from the whiteboard into the real world.

3. Measure what actually changed, not whether people enjoyed the day

Post-program surveys that ask people to rate the speaker, the content and the venue tell you almost nothing about development. They measure satisfaction. We would never judge a fitness program solely on whether participants enjoyed the trainer; we’d want to know whether they got stronger. Corporate learning deserves the same standard. Measure impact through manager observation, peer feedback, self-reflection, or tracking the specific behaviours the program was designed to build. If you can’t measure whether behaviour changed, you can’t know whether the investment was worth making.

Thankfully, none of this requires scrapping what you already have; it simply requires adding a layer that most programs are missing: the experience layer. The part where people actually do something with what they’ve learned, gather data on what happened, and come back wiser rather than simply informed. For decades we’ve treated learning as an information problem, but we’ve had it wrong. Most people already know more than enough to improve the way they lead, communicate, and work. The challenge is translating information into lived experience.

The organisations that win the next decade won’t be the ones that give people access to the most content. They’ll be the ones that help people experiment, apply, reflect and grow. Information creates awareness. Experience creates change. That’s how you move from ticking boxes to transformation.

Tamsin Simounds is a former corporate healthcare leader, an executive coach, and author of The Experiment Mindset.

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