Why Your Company's Training Budget is Being Wasted

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The bloke in the expensive suit just spent forty-five minutes explaining why our sales team needs "disruptive innovation mindset coaching" at $3,500 per head. I'm sitting there thinking about my mate Dave, who increased his territory sales by 30% last year using nothing but old-school relationship building and actually listening to what customers wanted.

That's when it hit me: we're completely bollocks at training in Australian business.

After nearly two decades in workplace development and sitting through more corporate training sessions than I care to remember, I've watched millions of dollars evaporate into thin air. Not because training isn't valuable – it absolutely is – but because we're doing it all wrong.

The Tick-Box Mentality is Killing Us

Here's the uncomfortable truth: most companies treat training like a compliance exercise rather than an investment in human potential. They'll spend months researching the perfect Learning Management System, hire consultants who've never worked a day in their target industry, and roll out generic programmes that make about as much sense as a screen door on a submarine.

I once worked with a mining company that sent their field supervisors to a three-day "leadership excellence workshop" in a fancy Sydney hotel. Beautiful venue. Inspiring speakers. Motivational videos. The works.

Three months later, nothing had changed on site. Why? Because nobody had bothered to ask what these supervisors actually needed to lead better. Turns out they were struggling with roster management, dealing with FIFO stress, and communicating safety changes effectively. The workshop covered vision boards and emotional intelligence theories.

Complete mismatch.

We're Obsessed with the Wrong Metrics

Walk into any HR department and ask them about training effectiveness. I guarantee they'll show you completion rates, satisfaction scores, and maybe some before-and-after quiz results. What they won't show you is genuine behaviour change or measurable business impact.

Satisfaction scores are particularly useless. Of course people rate a training session highly when it gets them out of their normal work for a day, includes catered lunch, and features an engaging presenter. That doesn't mean they learned anything useful.

I learned this the hard way during my early consulting days. I was delivering communication training sessions that consistently scored 8.5+ out of 10 for satisfaction. Participants loved the interactive exercises and group discussions. But when I followed up six months later, barely anyone could remember the key techniques, let alone implement them.

The real measure of training success isn't whether people enjoyed it – it's whether they're doing their jobs differently (and better) afterwards.

The One-Size-Fits-All Trap

Corporate Australia has this bizarre obsession with standardised training programmes. Head office decides everyone needs "customer service excellence training" and proceeds to deliver identical content to retail staff, call centre operators, field technicians, and account managers.

This makes about as much sense as giving the same driving lesson to someone learning in a Corolla and someone learning to drive a road train. The fundamentals might overlap, but the context, challenges, and practical applications are completely different.

Smart companies customise their approach. Take Bunnings – and yes, I'm biased because I think they do customer service brilliantly – they don't just teach product knowledge. They train their team members to recognise DIY skill levels and adjust their communication accordingly. A tradie buying plumbing supplies gets different treatment than a weekend warrior attempting their first deck build.

That's contextualised training that actually works.

The Follow-Up Failure

This is where most training programmes die a quiet death: the day after delivery.

Someone attends a fantastic time management workshop, learns brilliant techniques for prioritisation and delegation, gets genuinely excited about implementing changes... then returns to an unchanged environment with the same impossible workload, dysfunctional systems, and competing priorities.

What happens? Old habits resurface within a week.

Effective training requires environmental support. This means manager buy-in, system changes, and ongoing reinforcement. It means creating space for people to practice new skills without the pressure of maintaining their usual productivity levels.

Most companies skip this entirely. They deliver the training, tick the box, and wonder why nothing improves.

The Authority Problem

Here's something that'll ruffle feathers: we're often getting trained by people who've never done the job they're teaching us to do better.

I've sat through sales training delivered by former teachers, leadership workshops run by career trainers, and technical courses taught by consultants whose hands-on experience peaked during their university internship. These people might be excellent educators, but they lack the credibility that comes from real-world application.

The best training I've ever received came from practitioners who were still actively working in their field. They knew which theories actually worked under pressure, which shortcuts were worth taking, and which industry-specific challenges the textbooks never mentioned.

When Qantas trains their cabin crew, they don't hire generic hospitality trainers. They use experienced flight attendants who understand the unique pressures of airline service. The result? Training that's immediately relevant and credible.

Budget Allocation Madness

Most training budgets are distributed like fairy dust – a little bit everywhere, not enough anywhere to make a real difference. Companies will spend $500 per person on six different programmes rather than $3,000 per person on one comprehensive development opportunity that might actually create lasting change.

It's the training equivalent of buying six cheap tools instead of one quality one that'll last.

There's also this weird inverse relationship between seniority and training investment. Junior staff get loads of development opportunities (most of which they'll forget by next Tuesday), while experienced employees who could actually mentor others and drive cultural change get nothing beyond mandatory compliance updates.

Backwards thinking.

The Technology Distraction

Don't get me started on e-learning platforms. Yes, they're convenient and cost-effective for delivering basic information. But somewhere along the line, we convinced ourselves that watching a video series about leadership was equivalent to actual leadership development.

Online training works brilliantly for knowledge transfer – compliance requirements, product updates, procedural changes. It's hopeless for skill development that requires practice, feedback, and social learning.

Yet I see companies proudly announcing they've "digitised their entire training programme" as if removing human interaction was an improvement rather than a cost-cutting measure dressed up as innovation.

What Actually Works

After years of watching training programmes fail and occasionally succeed, the patterns are pretty clear.

Successful training is specific, practical, and immediately applicable. It addresses real problems that participants are currently experiencing. It includes opportunities for practice and feedback. It has ongoing support and reinforcement built in.

Most importantly, it treats learners as intelligent adults who can adapt principles to their unique situations rather than robots who need to follow scripts.

The companies getting this right aren't necessarily spending more money. They're spending smarter. They're asking better questions before designing programmes. They're measuring outcomes instead of activities. They're treating training as an ongoing process rather than an event.

The Bottom Line

Your training budget isn't being wasted because training doesn't work. It's being wasted because you're approaching it wrong.

Stop buying off-the-shelf solutions for custom problems. Stop measuring the wrong things. Stop treating training like a one-off event instead of an ongoing investment in capability.

And for the love of all that's holy, stop sending people to "mindset workshops" when what they really need is practical skill development.

The irony is that with all our focus on innovation and disruption, the most effective training approaches are often the oldest ones: apprenticeships, mentoring, on-the-job coaching, and learning from people who've actually mastered what they're teaching.

Maybe that's not sexy enough for the corporate training industry. But it works. Which is more than you can say for most of what passes for professional development these days.

Trust me, your people deserve better. And so does your budget.