Why Your Training Budget Isn’t Changing Anything

Organisations spend billions on training every year. The programmes get delivered. The feedback forms come back positive. The budgets get approved again.

And yet, most of what people learn in training never makes it back to their actual work.

This isn’t a secret. It’s one of the most well-documented problems in organisational development. But it persists because most organisations are measuring the wrong things and ignoring the factors that actually determine whether learning transfers to performance.

The transfer problem

Scientific research shows that people forget about 70% of new information within 24 hours1. This isn’t a failure of memory. It’s how memory works. The brain constantly filters what to retain and what to discard, and a two-day workshop rarely makes the cut.

The issue isn’t just forgetting. It’s application. The transfer problem describes the tendency of training participants to fail to transfer the skills or behaviours they acquired during training to the workplace2. People learn something in a training room, return to their desks, and never use it.

Only 35% of organisations have formal processes in place to measure the transfer of learning3. Which means most organisations have no idea whether their training investments are actually improving performance or just adding to costs.

What gets measured, and what doesn’t

Most training evaluation stops at satisfaction. Did participants enjoy the session? Would they recommend it? Did the trainer get good ratings?

These metrics are easy to collect and feel reassuring. But they tell you almost nothing about whether the training worked.

48% of organisations reported that demonstrating the impact of learning programs was one of their biggest challenges4. Not because impact is impossible to measure, but because it requires tracking what happens after the training ends, not just what happens during it.

The gap between learning something and applying it is where most training investment disappears. Participants leave with good intentions and new knowledge. Then they return to the same environment, the same pressures, the same habits. Without reinforcement, without support, without opportunities to practise, the learning fades.

What actually determines transfer

Research on learning transfer points to factors that most training programmes ignore entirely.

Factors within the work environment are primarily responsible for determining whether the transfer of training into everyday work is successful5. Particularly relevant are support from colleagues and supervisors, opportunities to apply knowledge, availability of time resources, and feedback.

In other words, what happens after training matters more than what happens during it.

If a manager attends a leadership programme but goes back to a culture that doesn’t support developmental feedback, the training won’t stick. If someone learns a new skill but never gets the chance to practise it, the skill atrophies. If there’s no follow-up, no accountability, no reinforcement, the investment was wasted.

Research consistently shows that organisations that implement structured follow-up and accountability see significantly higher training ROI6. Yet most training programmes end when the session ends.

The return on getting this right

When training is designed with transfer in mind, the results are measurable. Companies that excel at learning and development see 218% higher income per employee7. Organisations with strong learning cultures report 30-50% higher engagement and retention rates8.

But these results don’t come from training alone. They come from organisations that diagnose what needs to change, design interventions that address the real problem, build in practice and reinforcement, and measure whether behaviour actually improves.

The question isn’t whether your organisation needs to invest in development. The question is whether that development is designed to transfer, or just designed to deliver.

Tanya Davis is the founder of PELMO International and author of the #1 bestselling book Leadership Cannot Be Automated. She works with organisations across 50+ countries to diagnose and fix leadership and communication breakdowns.

Sources

1. Ebbinghaus, H. “Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology.” 1885. (Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve)

2. Baldwin, T.T. & Ford, J.K. “Transfer of Training: A Review and Directions for Future Research.” Personnel Psychology, 1988.

3. ATD Research. “State of the Industry Report.”

4. LinkedIn Learning. “2023 Workplace Learning Report.”

5. Gegenfurtner, A. et al. “Transfer of Training: A Meta-Analytic Review.”
Journal of Applied Psychology, 2009.

6. Harvard Business Review. “Making Learning Stick: Best Practices for Learning Transfer.”

7. Association for Talent Development (ATD). “State of the Industry Report.”

8. Bersin by Deloitte. “The Impact of Learning Culture on Business Performance.