Technology investment involves a bargain. A business accepts an upfront hit in cost, effort, time or disruption because it expects a much greater return in the future. New systems are supposed to improve services, streamline processes and make organisations more efficient.
Training works on exactly the same principle: an initial hit, with huge payback in the subsequent months and years.
Software Training, As We Knew it, Is All But Dead.
In the UK tech sector businesses are increasingly cutting training investment. They see it as an optional extra, a luxury that can be trimmed when the coffers are running low. After all, it’s not like they’re required to provide it.
In most sensible professions, certainly the regulated and chartered ones, continuing professional development (CPD) is mandatory.
There’s an acceptance things change, and people need to keep up. Yet across much of the rapidly evolving tech sector, there is no comparable expectation of CPD.
Combine that with ongoing cost-cutting across the board, and it’s not surprising that formal training has gradually been replaced by access to online content.
But online self-study is not the same as professional training, and it‘s hurting morale, output and innovation.
I Stopped Selling Training Because Nobody Was Buying It
As a testing tools reseller, training was never my core business. But people did buy it. After all, they were rolling out advanced technology within core enterprise teams and wanted to make sure their staff could maximise the benefits of using it.
They’d carefully selected the software and invested time, effort and money to realise its potential business benefits. It therefore made sense to properly enable the users.
Nowadays, though, instead of being sent on a course, employees may receive a login to a learning platform, a collection of videos or a link to some documentation.
And that is the best-case scenario. In many instances, the software is simply thrown over the wall and employees are left to muddle through with YouTube.
Take AI chatbots, for example. They are rapidly becoming part of everyday working life. But how many employees have received any meaningful training in how to use them?
Access to Information Is Not the Same as Learning
Obviously, online learning has advantages. It is inexpensive, scalable and flexible. For confident, self-directed learners, it can work extremely well.
But people learn differently. Some need to hear an explanation. Others need to ask questions, discuss ideas, see demonstrations or practise under supervision.
Most of us don’t really know how we learn best, or even how learning works.
Have you ever been taught how to learn? It sounds like a strange question, but I can’t remember ever being taught how to structure my own development, identify gaps in my knowledge or turn passive information into practical capability.
Yet those are precisely the skills that online learning assumes we already possess.
Classroom Training Is Difficult to Replace
Classroom training, particularly away from the workplace, creates something online learning rarely provides: protected time. Participants are removed from emails, meetings, support requests and the temptation to skip ahead.
They can ask questions, learn from their peers and discover misunderstandings they did not know they had. An experienced trainer can also recognise confusion and explain the subject differently.
That does not make classroom training inherently superior. It means that replacing every form of development with an online course ignores how learning actually happens.
The Short-Term Impacts Are Serious
The immediate consequences are visible in morale and output.
- People struggle with tools they were never properly taught to use.
- Tasks take longer.
- Mistakes and rework increase.
- A small number of experts become permanent bottlenecks because everyone else depends on them.
- Employees are told to embrace change while being given neither the time nor the support required to understand it.
Poor Training Makes Good Tools Look Bad
There is another consequence of failing to train people: organisations gradually lose confidence in technology itself.
It plays out like this:
- A business buys a sophisticated tool but does not invest adequately in teaching people how to use it. Adoption remains shallow, the expected benefits never arrive and the business concludes that the tool was not worth the money.
- The next time it needs new technology, it is understandably less willing to invest. Instead, it selects an open-source alternative based largely on the absence of a licence fee.
- Unfortunately, this compounds the problem. The tool has been selected primarily to avoid an upfront fee, without properly considering the long term cost, never mind the additional expertise, support and maintenance it will require.
- Open-source alternatives often demand even more internal expertise to configure, integrate, maintain and use effectively. They may also lack some of the support and enterprise capabilities the business originally wanted.
- Knowledge becomes concentrated among a handful of specialists. The business has not eliminated lock-in; it has merely changed its form.
- As a result, confidence in tooling falls even further and future investment becomes harder to justify. The business becomes less able to innovate and increasingly trapped by the decisions it has already made.
It is a vicious cycle. What appears to be a failure of technology began as a failure to enable the people expected to use it.
The Long-Term Consequences Can Be Existential
Innovation depends on people having enough knowledge to imagine better ways of working. Teams that are not developing tend to repeat what they already know. They use a fraction of the capabilities available to them, avoid unfamiliar approaches and become increasingly cautious.
So even when businesses continue investing in new technology, they don’t realise the benefits. Without investing in learning, they simply layer new tools over old habits.
Ultimately, they stagnate. And in a rapidly evolving industry, we all know where that ends.
Training Must Be Treated Like Any Other Technology Investment
Training requires budget, time and effort, and it creates some short-term disruption. But the return comes through greater capability, higher output and better use of the systems the business has already bought.
Yes, cutting training removes one obvious cost from the budget today, but it creates much larger ones tomorrow: damaged morale, reduced output, wasted investment and lost innovation.
If businesses want technology to repay its upfront cost, they must invest in the people expected to generate that return. If they don’t, then what is the point in any of it?
Finally, I want to close with a question: When was the last time you received proper, professional training?
