How to Create Employee Training Programs That Stick

By
Amy Vidor
Learning and Development Evangelist at Synthesia

Create engaging interactive video courses in 160+ languages.

It is estimated that while American industries annually spend up to $100 billion on training and development, not more than 10% of these expenditures actually result in transfer to the job.

Does that statistic feel familiar?

Would you be surprised if I told you that it came from a 1988 article about transfer of training?

The point is, it’s been nearly 40 years since Baldwin and Ford introduced their transfer of training model to illustrate how workplace training translates into job performance through inputs, outcomes, and conditions.

What is an employee training program?

Someone teaches you how to do a job. First you watch them. Then you try it yourself. They help you when you mess up. You keep practicing until you're really good at it. Then you do the real job. But you have to keep doing it. If you stop doing it, you forget. So they keep reminding you and helping you practice again. Eventually it becomes something you just do without thinking.

And yet, enterprises struggle to design effective training programs. That’s because we design, deliver, and then move on. We spend so much time crafting the perfect experience, that we rarely have the capacity to measure whether the capability has been developed.

Phase 1: Analyze

Before you can build any training program you need to know what's not working for your targeted audience.

1. Define the performance gap
   What should people be doing? What are they actually doing instead? Where can you observe this behavior and how?

2. Gather evidence
   Search data you have access to, conduct listening sessions or interviews with stakeholders, or directly observe. Multiple sources give you a fuller picture than any single one.

3. Synthesize patterns
   Collate the data to understand root causes of the performance gap. Look for consistent breakdowns across inputs.

4. Validate your findings
   Ask 3–5 stakeholders (a manager, an HR Business Partner, a member of the targeted audience) to review your findings. Don't skip validation!

5. Translate into a capability statement
   Write something like: "After participating in this training program on [X], [target audience] should be able to [observable action] so that [business outcome]."

6. Align on success measures
   Determine what observable evidence can support whether or not your training impacted the performance gap.

Example: Manager training program

People leave managers, not companies.

Phase 2: Design

Building on your needs assessment, take the capability statement you wrote, and the success measures you identified, and plan the learning experience.

Capability Statement Example:

"After participating in this training program on the GROW coaching framework, newly-promoted, first-time people managers in engineering should be able to ask goal-focused questions to surface obstacles and options and confirm the direct report identifies and owns their own next step so that their direct employees report increased clarity on expectations and meet or exceed performance targets."

Learning Objectives:

1. Managers can guide a direct report to identify their own options and next steps in a coaching conversation, demonstrating that they trust the person's capability to solve the problem.
2. Managers can recognize when they're defaulting to problem-solving mode and redirect the conversation back to coaching.
3. Managers can end a coaching conversation where the direct report has identified at least one concrete action they will take independently.

Delivery Methods

Phase 4: Implement

Whenever possible, run a pilot for each component of the training program to see where there’s friction. You’re managing concurrent workstreams, such as logistics and learner engagement.

Phase 5: Evaluate

Measurement begins at this phase. Look at assessments, behavioral indicators, and system-level signals that show improvement.

Amy Vidor

Amy Vidor, PhD is a Learning & Development Evangelist at Synthesia, where she researches learning trends and helps organizations apply AI at scale.