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?

Having spent many years in Learning and Development, I remain troubled by how much attention we give to what happens inside the training room and how little attention we sometimes give to what happens when participants return to work.

We invest in designing learning experiences, selecting facilitators and creating engaging programmes, yet when the workshop ends, L&D moves on to the next assignment, managers return to their targets and employees are expected to apply what they have learned, often without the support or opportunities needed to do so.

We invest in learning experiences but sometimes neglect the environments in which that learning is supposed to make a difference.

Consider an employee who attends a programme on effective communication. She learns how to give constructive feedback, handle difficult conversations and communicate with confidence. She practises these skills and returns to work enthusiastic about doing things differently, only to encounter a manager who interrupts her, dismisses alternative opinions and reacts defensively whenever anyone challenges a decision.

By Wednesday, she has learned another lesson: the techniques taught during the workshop may be useful, but applying them in this workplace could be professionally uncomfortable.

Which lesson do you think will influence her behaviour?

This is the contradiction we rarely confront. We tell people to behave differently during training and then return them to workplaces that reward them for behaving exactly as they did before.

Sometimes employees have not failed to learn. The organisation has failed to make room for what they have learned.

Research has been telling us this for years. Blume et al. (2010), Transfer of Training: A Meta-Analytic Review, examined 89 empirical studies and found positive relationships between training transfer and factors including learner motivation and a supportive work environment. Hughes et al. (2020), The Role of Work Environment in Training Sustainment: A Meta-Analysis, in Human Factors, further examined the importance of peer, supervisor and organisational support in sustaining the application of learning.

The message is clear: what happens after training matters enormously.

And this brings me to managers.

We cannot continue treating employee development as something that belongs almost exclusively to the L&D department. L&D can design excellent learning experiences, but it cannot create every opportunity employees need to practise new skills, receive feedback and apply their learning to real business challenges.

A manager who discusses learning objectives before a programme, creates opportunities for application afterwards and coaches an employee through the inevitable difficulties is helping convert learning into capability. Compare that with the manager whose only involvement is approving the employee's absence and asking whether the workshop was enjoyable.

You cannot send people away to learn and expect them to return to a workplace that has no intention of changing.

But L&D professionals must also examine our own practices. We cannot spend weeks designing what happens during a two-day programme and give almost no thought to what should happen during the following two months.

If an employee attends a strategic-thinking programme, what opportunities will they have to contribute to strategic discussions afterwards? If a manager attends a coaching programme, who will observe, encourage and give feedback as they begin coaching their team? If employees learn new digital skills, will their work processes allow them to use those skills?

These are not questions to ask after the workshop. They should influence how we design the learning intervention in the first place.

And CEOs have a role here too. If an organisation invests in developing its people but does not create the conditions for them to apply what they have learned, it should not be surprised when the expected improvements in performance fail to materialise.

The question is therefore not simply whether L&D delivered an excellent programme. It is whether managers, organisational systems and workplace practices helped turn that learning into improved performance.

“The workshop may end on Friday, but the real test of learning begins on Monday. If the workplace does not support application, the organisation has paid for learning it may never use.”

Margaret Jackson

Perhaps it is time to stop congratulating ourselves simply because employees have completed another successful programme. We should be equally interested in what they are doing differently weeks and months later, what their managers have done to support them and whether the organisation is benefiting from the capabilities it has invested in developing.

Because learning does not end when the workshop ends. But if the organisation treats it as though it does, why should we expect performance to change?