Training without immediate application leads to rapid skills decay
Training people and not giving them a real way to apply it is just wasteful. We know this. We’ve seen it too many times, teams go through formal upskilling programs, come back, and jump straight into overloaded sprints. No structure. No direct application. The result? Everything learned fades fast. According to Doug Stephen at CGS, without reinforcement, people forget half of what they’ve learned in just one hour, 70% in one day, and 90% in a month. That’s from the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve. It’s real. And it’s costing companies more than they know.
Upskilling must be operational. Patrice Williams-Lindo, CEO of Career Nomad, is right, training without a follow-up plan is useless. Skills don’t live in PowerPoint slides. They survive through immediate, hands-on use; ideally within the first 30 to 60 days. That’s your window. After that, most of it becomes noise.
Think of it this way: you wouldn’t train an engineer and then delay them from engineering. Why treat software teams any differently? CEOs and division heads should be asking how newly trained people will be embedded into current projects. Are there live environments for them to immediately practice? Is there room for peer guidance or mentoring in that window where skills are still fresh? If not, then you’ve just spent a chunk of your L&D budget on shelfware.
Raoul-Gabriel Urma from Cambridge Spark and Tim Flower from Nexthink agree, it’s all about consistent reinforcement and integration into the flow of work. If your teams are learning new languages, frameworks, or platforms, and don’t hit a keyboard with them soon after, that investment is going nowhere. This is not abstract. It’s measurable. Identify what you’re training for, and make sure there’s a runway for it to take off immediately after.
Certification-focused training does not equate to real-world capability
Certifications are fine. But they’re not the goal. They are a checkpoint, not the finish line. Too often, managers tick the box when someone completes a certification and assume the problem is solved. It’s not. It just means someone studied hard enough to pass a test. There’s a big difference between understanding something in theory and knowing how to use it productively, inside your infrastructure, under pressure, with legacy systems in the mix.
Tim Beerman, CTO at Ensono, calls this out directly, certifications don’t immediately translate to job-readiness. Doug Stephen at CGS takes it further. He says certifications only prove someone can acquire knowledge, maybe even retain it. But unless that knowledge is stress-tested in an actual production environment, you have no idea what it’s worth. And he’s right.
That’s where competency frameworks come in. Build a map. Define what it means to be competent for a specific role, not just by title but by outcome. Certifications can be one part of that puzzle, but you also need labs, tests, simulations, and immersion in real workflows. Otherwise, you’re buying false comfort.
Williams-Lindo at Career Nomad puts it well, chasing certs just to score points with HR or align with brand prestige doesn’t mean someone can lead a cloud migration or secure your pipeline end-to-end. Getting good at something means using it, under conditions that match your business. If you give someone a cert in Kubernetes, but your actual need is Docker security hardening, the mismatch is on you. It’s not an education issue, it’s a leadership issue.
Design your learning plans around what matters to the business. What problems are you solving in the next 3 to 6 months? What environments are you deploying in? What scale are you operating at? If your training isn’t aligned with that, save your money. Or better yet, reinvest in tracked, hands-on, competence-based development before you get buried in credentials that don’t move the business forward.
Uniform training disregards individual learning preferences and neurodiversity
People don’t learn the same way. That’s obvious, yet many companies approach training as if everyone’s running on the same operating system. They’re not. And when you force one-size-fits-all learning, you waste time and reduce engagement. Teams made up of developers, data scientists, engineers, these groups include a range of learning styles and often neurodiverse individuals. If your training only works for one type of learner, you’re setting a portion of your talent up to fail.
Patrice Williams-Lindo, CEO at Career Nomad, points out how rigid formats, like blanket Coursera subscriptions or mass bootcamp enrollments, alienate people. Not every learner can process linear video content or retain information after a four-hour Zoom. Some need hands-on experiments. Others need visual guidance or short bursts of microlearning that fit into fragmented days. Ignoring these differences isn’t just poor planning. It’s bad leadership.
John Blythe, Director of Cyber Psychology at Immersive, reinforces this. He highlights that training aligned to personal learning needs is more likely to stick. That translates directly to business performance. Tim Flower from Nexthink shares from direct experience, text-heavy modules don’t work for him. He learns best by doing, by visual experimentation, not by reading. Multiply stories like this across your workforce. When you don’t accommodate those needs, skill uptake gets blocked.
Raoul-Gabriel Urma at Cambridge Spark also recommends designing training environments that go beyond static content. Blend project-based tasks with videos, coaching, workshops, and real-time presentations. This kind of design does two things well: it respects how people actually learn, and it keeps them invested. You get deeper retention, and your teams build functional, usable knowledge, not just theory stored in PDFs or ignored in course dashboards.
For C-suite leaders, this isn’t about personalizing every single piece of content. It’s about offering flexibility. If your learning platform or vendor gives only one method of delivery, change it. Ensure learning systems are designed with range and accessibility. This lowers friction for different cognitive styles, keeps your training ROI high, and improves how fast teams evolve with the business.
Focusing on trendy tech skills without business alignment wastes resources
Upskilling your tech teams on the latest tools or platforms might sound forward-thinking. But unless those skills serve an immediate or near-future business goal, you’re just staying busy, not moving forward. Too many companies chase whatever’s hot, AI, edge computing, blockchain, without asking a basic question: how does this help right now?
Patrice Williams-Lindo makes this clear: learning AI or quantum computing might sound impressive, but it adds no value unless the business has a use case within the 6–12 month window. If the business need is cloud modernization or zero-trust architecture, training on generalized algorithm frameworks is misaligned.
George Fironov, CEO at Talmatic, calls this one of the most common leadership mistakes in tech. He points out that overemphasis on “flavor-of-the-month” training creates talent misalignment, inflates spend, and produces zero forward momentum. Every hour your teams spend learning tools they won’t use is time not spent solving current problems.
Kevin Surace, CEO and CTO at Appvance, offers a sanity check, start by identifying the problem your team needs to solve. Then map the skill set required to solve it. That becomes your upskilling strategy. Anything outside of that is noise. Tim Flower at Nexthink backs this up. Repeatedly ask: What are we trying to solve? Why? Until the problem is clearly defined. Then, and only then, design the training around it.
Executives need to hold a tighter lens on relevance. Upskilling is an investment, and it needs focus. If the skill is not clearly linked to product delivery, customer experience, cost efficiency, or a critical innovation initiative, rethink it. Technology shifts fast, but organizational strategy can’t keep pivoting to follow it. You train to accomplish goals, not just keep pace with buzzwords.
Sending employees to conferences without purpose or follow-up delivers little return
Too many managers still treat conferences as a substitute for actual training. They send staff to large industry events, check the box, and expect an automatic lift in knowledge or capability. That expectation is flawed. Most conferences provide generalized content. Without relevance to a team’s specific responsibilities or current initiatives, the net gain is minimal. What happens next is predictable, attendees return with scattered insights, no defined action items, and quickly fall back into their old work routines.
Nhi Nguyen, Founder and Partner at Agilify, has seen this happen repeatedly. She points out that companies often pick conferences based on popularity rather than strategic alignment. Teams attend sessions that don’t match their experience level or job focus. There’s no targeted learning plan, and more importantly, no post-conference structure to convert new exposure into action.
Investing in conferences without accountability is a missed opportunity. Nguyen describes a process that works, match the conference to the individual’s current role and growth path, then require a tangible outcome when they return. That could be a lunch-and-learn session for peers, an internal proposal based on content from the event, or integration of new methods into an active project. This approach turns passive knowledge into direct organizational value.
For C-suite leaders, the principle here is clear: stop defaulting to conferences as catch-all solutions. Use them as focused accelerators only when they align with defined business goals. Require post-event contribution. If you can’t identify how the learning connects to current roadmaps or problem sets, then don’t spend the money. If the team can’t teach or apply what they’ve learned, then the outcome was entertainment, not education.
Effective training aligns employee aspirations with business objectives to drive retention and competitiveness
Training should not operate in isolation from business goals. It also shouldn’t ignore individual ambition. The companies that lead in both talent retention and capability development are the ones connecting these two forces. They understand that skill-building needs to move the dial on business outcomes while also building meaningful career momentum for the individual. That’s how you retain top performers and future-proof your organization.
Patrice Williams-Lindo, CEO at Career Nomad, makes a strong case for this alignment. She argues that when training initiatives reflect both the needs of the company and the career direction of the employee, they stop being just another cost on the P&L. Instead, they become engines for growth and retention. This mindset requires intention, training systems need to support what the business is working toward next, while also offering clear development pathways for the people expected to deliver it.
This means executives can’t treat training as an off-the-shelf purchase. It’s a strategic build. Ask: What are our most urgent challenges at the organizational level? What initiatives are going to define success for the next 12 to 24 months? Now, what do our people want to master, and where do they want to go? Between those answers is your learning architecture.
Tech cycles are accelerating. The businesses that wait for skills to become a problem will be too late. Those that design training into their operational model, rooted in both evolving needs and individual ambition, are the ones that will maintain speed, adaptability, and higher-performing teams.
The ROI is measurable. Better retention, shorter time-to-productivity, and teams that act quickly when the tech stack shifts or new solutions are needed. This is what separates companies that adapt from the ones that fall behind. When you connect business objectives and team growth deliberately, training stops being overhead, and becomes a competitive advantage.
Key highlights
- Training without follow-through wastes budget and time: Leaders should ensure new skills are applied within 30 to 60 days, through projects, mentorships, or real-work scenarios, to prevent rapid skills decay and maximize training ROI.
- Certifications do not guarantee real-world performance: Executives should view certifications as baseline indicators and supplement them with hands-on assessments to verify job-relevant competency.
- Standardized training ignores how people actually learn: Training programs must accommodate diverse learning styles and neurodivergent needs using varied formats like microlearning, labs, and coaching to boost retention and engagement.
- Trending tech skills are a distraction without strategic alignment: Leaders should tie all upskilling efforts directly to business priorities, using defined problems to dictate which skills are urgently needed.
- Conferences with no follow-up deliver no value: Only send employees to events that align with their current roles, and require clear post-conference knowledge transfers or project integrations to ensure organizational benefit.
- Training must align employee growth with business outcomes: Executives should treat training as a strategic growth tool, when training supports both company goals and employee aspirations, it drives retention, performance, and adaptability.
