Aligning Training with Business Goals

Louder for the people at the back 🎤 Many organisations today seem to have shifted from being institutions that develop great talent to those that primarily seek ready-made talent. This trend overlooks the immense value of individuals who, despite lacking experience, possess a great attitude, commitment, and a team-oriented mindset. These qualities often outweigh the drawbacks of hiring experienced individuals with a fixed and toxic mindset. The best organisations attract talent with their best years ahead of them, focusing on potential rather than past achievements. Let’s be clear this is more about mindset and willingness to learn and unlearn as apposed to age. To realise the incredible potential return, organisations must commit to creating an environment where continuous development is possible. This requires a multi-faceted approach: 1. Robust Training Programmes: Employers should invest in comprehensive training programmes that equip employees with the necessary skills for their roles. This includes on-the-job training, mentorship programmes, online courses, and workshops. 2. Redefining Hiring Criteria: Organisations should revise their hiring criteria to focus more on candidates’ potential and willingness to learn rather than solely on prior experience or formal qualifications. Behavioural interviews, aptitude tests, and probationary periods can help assess a candidate's ability to learn and adapt. 3. Partnerships with Educational Institutions: Companies can collaborate with educational institutions to design curricula that align with industry needs. Apprenticeship programmes, internships, and cooperative education can bridge the gap between academic learning and practical job skills. 4. Lifelong Learning Culture: Encouraging a culture of lifelong learning within organisations is crucial. Employers should provide ongoing education opportunities and support for professional development. This includes continuous skills assessment and access to resources for upskilling and reskilling. 5. Inclusive Recruitment Practices: Employers should implement inclusive recruitment practices that remove biases and barriers. Blind recruitment, diversity quotas, and targeted outreach programmes can help ensure that diverse candidates are given a fair chance. By implementing these measures, organisations can develop a workforce that is adaptable, innovative, and resilient, ensuring sustainable success and growth.

We have a retention problem in corporate learning. Despite 98% of companies implementing eLearning and billions invested in training platforms, employees forget 90% of what they learn within a week. The issue isn't lack of content—it's that we're still designing learning like academic courses instead of performance support. After analyzing what separates effective L&D content from the training that gets completed but never applied, I've identified 7 key principles that actually drive behavior change in the workplace. The shift required: Stop teaching skills in isolation. Start solving real performance problems. Your employees don't need another module about "communication best practices." They need to know exactly what to say when a client meeting derails or how to handle 47 "urgent" requests when they're already at capacity. The companies getting this right aren't just seeing higher completion rates—they're seeing measurable performance improvements and 30-50% better retention rates. Full breakdown in the article below, including a practical implementation framework for transforming your L&D approach from information delivery to performance improvement. What's been your experience with learning content that actually sticks versus training that gets forgotten immediately?

"The Day I Watched £18,000 Walk Off Site (Because We Didn't Train Our Apprentice Fast Enough)" I'll never forget watching Jake pack his tools into that beaten-up Ford Fiesta for the last time. 18 months we'd invested in him. College fees, wages, mentor time. £18,000 down the drain. His exit interview was brutal: "I'm going to Thompson's. They've got proper training systems and their apprentices actually know what they're doing by month 6." That hit hard. Because he was right. We'd done what every contractor does - thrown him on site with our best sparky and hoped he'd "pick it up." No structured training. No SOPs. No measurement of his progress. Meanwhile, Thompson's had apprentices running cable routes independently after 3 months, using proper documentation systems, following standardized procedures. Their apprentices became productive contributors. Ours became expensive passengers. Here's what I learned: College teaches theory. We need to teach productivity. So, I stopped treating apprentice training like a legal obligation and started treating it like the business investment it actually is. We created structured training pathways. Week-by-week competencies. Real measurement systems. Proper mentoring protocols outside of academic requirements. Result? Our next apprentice was generating billable value by month 4. Third-year apprentices now train the new ones. 85% retention rate. Zero poaching from competitors. The biggest mistake electrical contractors make isn't hiring poor apprentices. It's assuming that paying college fees equals providing proper training. College gives them the knowledge. You need to give them the systems to apply it productively. The quicker your apprentice becomes genuinely productive, the better for everyone - including them. www.optimisedenergy.group #ApprenticeTraining #ElectricalTraining #WorkforceOptimization #SkillsDevelopment #ElectricalContractors #ProductivityImprovement #TeamDevelopment #SOPs #StructuredTraining #ApprenticeRetention #BusinessOptimization

I was just speaking with the L&D Leader of a multi-billion dollar business who shared their journey to securing the business data needed to prove L&D's impact, a common struggle for many of us. They’d been on both ends of the spectrum: the Fortune 500 company where a high-ranking person refused to share business data and their current role where stakeholders are willing to hand over the data. For L&D professionals, getting access to those business metrics is half the battle. Here is the strategic approach they used to build an indispensable L&D function: 1. Focus on the business's biggest pain points (quantified with data) They targeted major, quantifiable business risks. Their first focus was fixing a massive problem: Ridiculously high turnover in one of the business units. They were also intensely interested in attrition, seeing the correlation between how they were preparing people and the number of people leaving. 2. Deliver wins before asking for the keys They built trust by showing immediate, quantifiable value first, offering to help with no questions asked. This resulted in: - Increasing the production output of new starters by focusing more on the actual work during training - Then shaving weeks off of a multi-month training program for new starters due to greater focus on performance and impact and then asking whether there was a more efficient way of achieving the same results - Which all resulted in business partners sharing more data with them because they saw such a huge impact on their day-to-day work. 3. Mirror the metrics that matter Their team now formally aligns L&D goals with business-driven outcomes. They write goals based on the same business metrics their stakeholders use when meeting with their own teams. Their future goals include things like: - Reduce x amount of time in the classroom - See x amount of proficiency on calls - Achieve x amount of billing 4. Provide proactive visibility (report out constantly) They don't wait for stakeholders to ask for updates. They report out L&D's impact quarterly, transparently and proactively, putting it in the hands of stakeholders. This strategic visibility ensures L&D is never overlooked. This transformation has shifted L&D from a service line that could be cut to a strategic partner that the business says, "We can't live without you". There’s so much to learn from and admire about this L&D leader’s approach, but in a nutshell: You must be married to the business's challenges, not just delivering learning in the hope of affecting them. We're rarely going to be invited to the conversations we want to be in and so we need to take our opportunities, deliver impact, use successes as leverage and reinforce - via our actions - that we are a crucial factor when it comes to driving performance and results.

Some of my hardest lessons as a sales leader came when figuring out how to setup and run training (learn from my mistakes!) Me as a new leader: "Great we have 10 topics we want to cover... let's do 1 a week. 2.5 months later we will have covered SO much ground!" 🙃 Training was more of a "box checking" exercise. Someone shared feedback on what they wanted to learn, and it got added to the list Having one 30 or 60 minute training on any topic is never sufficient, and I did the team a disservice So what was missing? And what did I seek to add later? 👉 Focus Instead of 10 topics, we might go into a quarter with 1-2 priority focus areas. The deeper engagement on a narrower topic is not unlike narrowing your focus on a smaller set of ICP accounts This creates room for practice, follow up sessions, different voices delivering the material, and ultimately makes the content stickier 👉 Engagement from other departments Where applicable, involvement from other departments can add incredible value to your training program. For instance, when you are training on a new product category, it is valuable to: - Hear firsthand from Product how it's built - Align your training timeline with Product Marketing so that materials are ready to go as the training commences - Work with Marketing so that messaging aligns to how you can sell it and everyone has the same talking points from day 1 - Work with Rev Ops to identify a market opportunity to apply your learnings - Have Sales Enablement help prepare uses cases in your sales tech stack 👉 A system to encourage accountability Once the trainings are delivered, how do you know that the sales team was paying attention? That can take many forms: - Group activity like pitch practice - Measuring adoption through tools like Gong - Contest/SPIF to encourage initial matching sales activity - Knowledge tests in your LMS (my least favorite) 👉 Repetition There's a reason Sesame Street used to repeat episodes during the week - once wasn't enough to get the message home! While your sales team isn't full of 3 year olds, similar principles apply Bottom line: instead of thinking about any topic as a single "training", think about creating "training programs" for your team 🎓 Tying it all together for a training on "New Product A" Week 1: Product & Product Marketing introduce the new offering Week 2: Outside expert/marketing/leadership deliver the industry POV Week 3: Team gets together to identify prospects and practice the pitch Week 4: Team provides feedback on material and prospecting plans are built incorporating the training Weeks 5-8: Measuring adoption through Gong. Shouting out strong adoption and privately helping laggards identify gaps in understanding Week 6: Short contest to encourage cross/up-sell opportunity creation Week 12: Revisit/Feedback #SalesEnablement #SalesTraining #LeadershipLessons #CorrCompetencies

T.A. Pai Management Institute in Manipal is driving executive education for Coca-Cola, ITC, and Adani Group, ensuring that data-backed insights shape consumer-driven strategies. Amity University and Symbiosis International University are deeply involved in industry projects with Reliance Retail, Bharti Airtel, HDFC Bank, and Deloitte, reinforcing the importance of faculty-led corporate training as a crucial driver of business excellence. Yes, corporate training modules, methods and execution models are changing. 📌 The traditional model of corporate learning—where we always invite industry leaders to universities—is changing. It’s time we reverse the practice and send our best faculty members to conduct executive education programs at the world’s top organizations. The future of education and corporate learning lies in Faculty-Led Corporate Training—where our educators, researchers, and faculty members step into corporate boardrooms, leadership summits, and executive training programs to empower industry leaders with cutting-edge knowledge, research-backed insights, and transformative skills. Why Faculty-Led Corporate Training? 📌 Professors bring decades of academic research, case studies, and analytical insights that can transform corporate decision-making.📌 Premium Institutions have designed executive education programs that focus on business strategy, leadership, innovation 📌 Unlike generic corporate training, faculty-led programs use case studies, problem-solving workshops, and real-world simulations. 📌Faculty trained executives adopt multi-sector strategies by applying academic principles to corporate environments. Let me share examples of some of the institutions who have already adopted this practice. 📌 Internationally, London Business School is equipping leaders at Barclays, HSBC, BP, Shell, and British Airways with expertise in private equity, digital marketing, and risk management. 📌 The National University of Singapore and Nanyang Technological University are working closely with Singapore Airlines, DBS Bank, and Temasek Holdings to enhance corporate capabilities in data science, risk management, and global trade. 📌 China Europe International Business School is at the forefront of corporate learning for Alibaba, Huawei, Tencent, and BYD Auto, ensuring that technology-driven business ecosystems continue to thrive. 📌 IIMs and IITs are actively shaping the leadership terrain by training CXOs, MDs, and senior professionals from Tata Group, Infosys, Wipro, L&T, Mahindra, HCL Technologies, TCS, Tata Steel, ONGC, Reliance, ICICI Bank, Axis Bank, Flipkart, and Aditya Birla Group. With a strong focus on leadership, business strategy, financial modeling, data analytics, AI, and global trade policies. It’s time to empower faculty to step outside the campus, conduct corporate training at the national and international level. Tag to those academic Institutions you know who have adopted such practices.

𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐜𝐨𝐬𝐭𝐥𝐲 𝐦𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐤𝐞 𝐦𝐨𝐬𝐭 𝐨𝐫𝐠𝐚𝐧𝐢𝐳𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬 𝐦𝐚𝐤𝐞 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐥𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐡𝐢𝐩 𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐢𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠 They treat it like a one-time event. A workshop. A box ticked. An expense. The result? Underwhelming impact and wasted budgets. The truth is: training only works when it is designed like a leadership journey, not a classroom session. That’s how executive presence gets built - through repeated practice, reflection, and reinforcement. Here are 3 ways to make training stick and deliver business results: 𝟏. 𝐃𝐞𝐬𝐢𝐠𝐧 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐩𝐮𝐫𝐩𝐨𝐬𝐞 Build structured journeys. Pre-work, dynamic sessions, post-work application. Like a mission, not a meeting. 𝟐. 𝐑𝐞𝐢𝐧𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐜𝐞 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐫𝐞𝐭𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧  Group Coaching, virtual peer huddles, and daily quick-hit refreshers so new skills don’t fade. 𝐌𝐞𝐚𝐬𝐮𝐫𝐞 𝐰𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐬 Track the business impact. Not just attendance sheets and smiley-face feedback. One of our clients discovered this the hard way. For years, they invested in sending leaders to The Ivy League MBA schools, skills workshops, communication templates, even role-play drills. Each worked in rehearsals. But in real CXO and board conversations, the impact never stuck. That’s when they shifted to our 𝐄𝐱𝐞𝐜𝐮𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐏𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐈𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐯𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 that included an 𝐄𝐱𝐞𝐜𝐮𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐏𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐈𝐧𝐟𝐥𝐮𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐀𝐬𝐬𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭 and 100-day journey. The difference? Senior leaders didn’t just learn, they practiced, measured progress, and reinforced behaviours until they became second nature. Within 4 months, senior leaders reported: ✅ 𝟔𝟑% 𝐢𝐧𝐜𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐬𝐞 𝐢𝐧 𝐡𝐢𝐠𝐡-𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐤𝐞𝐬 𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐟𝐢𝐝𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞  ✅ 𝟓𝟕% 𝐢𝐦𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐢𝐧 𝐜𝐥𝐚𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐨𝐟 𝐞𝐱𝐞𝐜𝐮𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐦𝐮𝐧𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧  ✅ 𝟓𝟓% 𝐮𝐩𝐥𝐢𝐟𝐭 𝐢𝐧 𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐥𝐥 𝐞𝐱𝐞𝐜𝐮𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐩𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞 CEO noticed the shift immediately in boardroom decision-making and stakeholder engagement. When you do this, training shifts from being an expense to becoming a strategic asset that fuels collaboration, loyalty, and decision-making. That’s how organizations grow leaders with true presence. 👉 What’s one reinforcement practice you’ve seen work well in your company’s L&D programs? #ExecutivePresence #CoachVikram #Impact #Leadership

Leadership Development Needs a Rethink—Here’s Why Most leadership development programs are curated experiences—classroom sessions, offsite training, and one-size-fits-all frameworks. There's room for that but that alone is no longer enough. Here’s the gap: 👉 They happen outside of the real work. 👉 They focus on individual leadership, not how leaders work together. 👉 They rarely address the real business challenges teams are facing. Leadership isn’t an individual sport—it’s a team effort. The best leadership development doesn’t happen in isolation. It happens when teams work through real challenges together to solve complex problems that matter to the business. ✔️ Instead of generic training, focus on how leadership teams think, collaborate, and execute together. ✔️ Instead of case studies, use real-world current business challenges as the foundation for learning. ✔️ Instead of only developing individuals to be better leaders, create a team-based development to become better teams. Real leadership isn’t learned in a room—it’s built in the moments that will either shape or break the future of your business. What's your take on this? #Leadership #Teaming #HighPerformance #Collaboration #Change Lily Woi Coaching Limited

A lot of time and money goes into corporate training—but not nearly enough comes out of it. In fact, companies spent $130 billion on training last year, yet only 25% of programs measurably improved business performance. Having run countless training workshops, I’ve seen firsthand what makes the difference. Some teams walk away energized and equipped. Others… not so much. If you’re involved in organizing training—whether for a small team or a large department—here’s how to make sure it actually works: ✅ Do your research. Talk to your team. What skills would genuinely help them day-to-day? A few interviews or a quick survey can reveal exactly where to focus. ✅ Start with a solid brief. Give your trainer as much context as possible: goals, audience, skill levels, examples of past work, what’s worked—and what hasn’t. ✅ Don’t shortchange the time. A 90-minute session might inspire, but it won’t transform. For deeper learning and hands-on practice, give it time—ideally 2+ hours or spaced chunks over a few days. ✅ Share real examples. Generic content doesn’t stick. When the trainer sees your actual slides, templates, and challenges, they can tailor the session to hit home. ✅ Choose the right group size. Smaller groups mean better interaction and more personalized support. If you want engagement, resist the temptation to pack the (virtual) room. ✅ Make it matter. Set expectations. Send reminders. And if it’s virtual, cameras on goes a long way toward focus and connection. ✅ Schedule follow-up support. Reinforcement matters. Book a post-session Q&A, office hours, or refresher so people actually use what they’ve learned. ✅ Follow up. Send a quick survey afterward to measure impact and shape the next session. One-off training rarely moves the needle—but a well-planned series can. Helping teams level up their presentation skills is what I do—structure, storytelling, design, and beyond. If that’s on your radar, I’d love to help. DM me to get the conversation started.

𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐒𝐞𝐜𝐫𝐞𝐭 𝐭𝐨 𝐓𝐫𝐚𝐢𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐓𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐀𝐜𝐭𝐮𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐲 𝐖𝐨𝐫𝐤𝐬? 𝐒𝐭𝐚𝐫𝐭 𝐚𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐄𝐧𝐝. 🏁 I used to think my job as an L&D professional started with a syllabus. I was wrong. Recently, I was tasked with building a learning solution for our Talent Acquisition (TA) team. The goal wasn’t just to "train recruiters"—it was to solve a business problem. Instead of looking at what they needed to know (Level 2), I started with what the business needed to achieve (Kirkpatrick Level 4). The "Reverse" Approach I didn’t start with slides. I started by analyzing Voice of the Customer (VOC) survey results, focusing on various metrics from both Hiring Managers and Candidates. Working Backwards: ✅ Level 4 (Results): I defined the business KPI. ✅ Level 3 (Behavior): Based on the VOC metrics, I identified the specific actions recruiters needed to change—specifically around "Precision Intake" and "Candidate Experience Management." ✅ Level 2 & 1 (Learning & Reaction): Only then did I design the actual training content that addressed those specific behavior gaps. The Result? The training didn't feel like a chore; it felt like a solution. Because I built it based on the actual metrics revealed in the VOC surveys, the TA team saw immediate value, and the business saw a measurable shift in hiring efficiency. The Lesson: If you want your learning solutions to be more than just "check-the-box" exercises, stop asking "What should we teach?" and start asking "What does the data say I need to solve?" How do you use VOC data to shape your enablement programs? 👇 #LearningAndDevelopment #InstructionalDesign #TalentAcquisition #KirkpatrickModel #Enablement #DataDrivenLD #BusinessImpact