Learning and development (L&D) should be the engine of growth inside your organisation. It’s how you upskill teams, support business strategy, and boost employee engagement. But what happens when that engine underdelivers?
Too often, L&D becomes a box-ticking exercise. Courses get launched, people click through, but nothing actually changes. The results speak for themselves: poor engagement, wasted resources, and a workforce that feels unsupported and unmotivated.
If this sounds familiar, it’s time to rethink how your organisation approaches learning.
Why L&D Underperforms (Even When You’re Trying)
Let’s start by acknowledging a tough truth: the presence of an LMS or training library doesn’t automatically mean learning is happening. Underperformance usually creeps in for a few key reasons:
- Lack of alignment with business goals – Training initiatives are disconnected from real-world outcomes or strategic direction. Make sure your LMS is geared to empower your people in ways that equip them to help achieve the wider business objectives.
- Low learner engagement – Courses are too generic, too long, or simply irrelevant to day-to-day challenges. Using a mix of media and varying content types helps keep your team interested.
- Poor measurement – Without meaningful data, it’s hard to track progress or prove value.
- Outdated delivery methods – Legacy platforms and clunky UX kill motivation before learning even begins. Using mobile learning, big teams across bigger spaces can all learn simultaneously and seamlessly.
- No reinforcement – Learning can’t be treated as a one-off event. Instead it is a process of continuous positive reinforcement and incremental improvement.
These issues aren’t just L&D problems—they affect culture, performance, and retention across the board.
Step 1: Align L&D With Business Objectives
The first step to solving underperformance is zooming out. Ask: What’s the business trying to achieve? Your learning strategy should be tied directly to these goals. That means designing programs that build the capabilities needed for expansion, innovation, compliance, or transformation.
L&D doesn’t sit on the sidelines, it’s a driver of results. When you link learning to strategic KPIs, buy-in increases and relevance skyrockets.
Quick Win: Conduct a skills gap analysis across departments. Match training plans to business-critical capabilities.
Step 2: Design for Engagement, Not Just Completion
If you’re measuring success by completion rates, you’re missing the bigger picture. Learners want content that’s quick to access, easy to navigate, and relevant to their roles.
Make learning feel like a help, not a hurdle.
- Use microlearning formats to keep content digestible.
- Personalise learning paths based on roles and responsibilities.
- Incorporate real-world scenarios and case studies.
- Build in social elements—peer learning, feedback loops, gamification.
Remember: Engaged learners aren’t just more likely to complete a course—they’re more likely to retain and apply what they’ve learned.
Step 3: Make Data Your Learning Compass
You can’t fix what you don’t measure. If your current platform only shows who clicked “complete,” you’re flying blind. Modern L&D needs actionable insights. That includes:
- Progress tracking at team and individual levels.
- Engagement heatmaps to spot friction points.
- Post-training assessments tied to performance outcomes.
Use data to refine content, identify gaps, and target interventions.
Pro tip: Track learning ROI by connecting training data with productivity, retention, or compliance metrics.
Step 4: Embed Learning in the Flow of Work
People are busy. Learning that lives in a separate, hard-to-access system will always feel like extra admin. Overcome underperformance by bringing training into the tools and environments employees already use.
- Offer mobile-friendly modules for on-the-go access.
- Integrate with communication tools.
- Send learning nudges and reminders.
When learning feels like a natural part of the workday, not a disruption, it gets traction.
Step 5: Build a Culture That Values Learning
Even the best tech won’t fix a culture problem. To overcome L&D underperformance long-term, the value of continuous development needs to be visible and shared from the top down.
- Leaders should champion learning publicly.
- Celebrate learning wins: certifications, skill mastery, innovation.
- Tie development to performance reviews and growth pathways.
Employees need to see that learning isn’t optional, it’s essential, supported, and rewarded.
The Bottom Line
Underperforming L&D isn’t a failure of effort, it’s usually a sign of misalignment, outdated delivery, and poor measurement. But it’s fixable.
By refocusing on strategic alignment, engagement, integration, and culture, organisations can transform learning from a passive checkbox to a powerful enabler of performance and growth. We believe that great learning doesn’t need to be complicated. Our LMS is designed to simplify, personalise, and scale your learning efforts, without losing sight of strategy.
Book a demo to see how Cnnect can help your team turn L&D into a strength, not a struggle.