We spend a great deal of time talking about L&D departments, training budgets, learning platforms, facilitators and programmes.

But one of the most powerful influences on whether people actually develop at work may be sitting much closer to them.

Their manager.

The workshop was excellent. The facilitator was engaging, the participants were enthusiastic, the evaluations were glowing and everybody left with a certificate. Three months later, however, very little has changed at work.

Does that sound familiar?

“Do you already have a course on this?”

I have been asked that question more times than I care to remember. A client identifies a problem, decides that training is the answer and then approaches the Learning and Development professional with what appears to be a perfectly reasonable request: “Do you already have the course?”

Whenever someone tells me, “But this is global HR best practice,” I am tempted to ask:

Best practice for whom?

For which industry? Which country? Which workforce? Which culture? Which labour market? Which business strategy?

Here is an uncomfortable question for HR leaders: if I removed your organisation's name from your HR strategy, could I tell which business it belonged to?

If the answer is no, we may have a problem.

There is a moment every trainer recognizes. It comes near the end of a session, not when you are speaking, but when you stop. When participants begin connecting ideas, challenging assumptions, and seeing new possibilities for themselves.

That moment is where learning becomes change.

Read this article to learn more about how to structure the work for conducting a needs assessment during the first phase of the training lifecycle.

Why Every Training Professional Needs a Structured TNA Process.

Recently, while reviewing several trainers during practice sessions, I noticed something puzzling. The sessions were well prepared, the trainers confident, and the activities engaging. Yet something essential was missing: the learning experience felt fragmented rather than coherent.

A few years ago, I worked with a senior leader whose organization was facing what many would describe as a performance crisis. Targets were being missed, the team was disengaged, and decisions were slow, often revisited, and sometimes avoided altogether. The instinctive response was predictable: more training. More frameworks. More tools.

Training doesn’t fix performance. Leadership does.