Smart Ways To Get Employees Excited About Workplace Training

By Kit Eaton

There are plenty of reasons workers need to undergo training, reskilling, or upskilling, including trying to bridge training gaps in rapidly evolving workplaces. Along with actual technical knowledge, one obstacle to addressing these gaps is differing expectations of management and staff about how to use new AI tech. If you’ve offered staff training and you wonder why people aren’t flocking to the sign-up sheets, perhaps some recent data and some new expert thinking will help you understand. It might prompt you to tweak your staff development programs, too.

Sandra Moran, chief marketing officer of Texas-based learning management company Schoox, explained in a report that while “the vast majority of employees say that they want training,” when it comes down to it, they “don’t feel like they’re actually getting the training that they need.” Staff then end up being slow to take up training offers from their employers, no matter if it’s to help them perform their current jobs or advance their careers through additional qualifications, despite the investment and encouragement of their employers, HRDive notes. 

Moran pointed to a Schoox study of frontline workers from 2024 that found only 24 percent “strongly” agreed they have the right amounts of training, while 40 percent admitted they’re not entirely clear about what their managers expect of them at work. Moran noted this complication also holds true for corporate workers. This suggests that workers do want, and actually need, training but they’re not able to get it.

She suggests that the main barrier to taking on training tasks is freeing up time. This holds true if “you’re a desk worker but especially if you’re a frontline worker,” Moran wrote, noting that you have to budget training periods into your day, worried that in some sense it’s “competing with other things that you’re doing.” 

Meanwhile, the training itself has to be meaningful, and recognizable as such to your workers, notes Bjorn Reynolds, founder and CEO of Texas-based business software company Safeguard Global. He explained to HRDive that workers aren’t so much disengaged with the whole idea of training, but they eschew training that they don’t see as leading to a “change in their career trajectory.”

They’ll ask “why am I doing this training?” and also wonder how it connects with the company’s plan in a way that makes attending the training worthwhile. And while they may grudgingly take on training, they may also find themselves forgetting less meaningful training quickly. Reynolds said this points to infrastructure issues in companies that are experiencing low training take-up.

This may sound more and more like a training paradox.

Here’s how you can help

Both experts gave advice on how to encourage workers to take part in training more enthusiastically, and in a way that means they retain the information and skills they learn. Here are five suggestions:

• Make training easier to do, offering options that line up with different learning needs of different staff.

• Give workers guidance on which learning programs will be relevant for their jobs.

• Help staff work out which skills they need, and thus should learn, to help them climb the promotions ladder or to shift sideways to a different part of the company.

• Consider the advantages of AI tools, which can guide workers through the learning process.

• Make it clear to your workers that training is as much a part of their job as tackling the tasks they’re required to do when at their desks.

  
  

The AI skills gap is going to become more pronounced

Many recent reports have shown that one of the biggest, and more important, skills and training gaps affecting companies right now is the AI gap. A new study from New York City-based data analytics company DataCamp shows how urgent it’s becoming to close this skills gap with meaningful training, getting staff enthused about what they’ve learned. 

The company spoke to hundreds of business leaders in the U.S. and U.K. and found that while these leaders know AI competence is as important to their company’s future as skills like writing or creating financial spreadsheets, they know their staff don’t yet have the necessary experience. 

The data also shows that there’s a correlation between seeing a meaningful return on investments in AI tools and companies with AI upskilling programs. About 17 percent of the leaders surveyed said they had not yet seen a positive ROI from AI, but this figure fell to 11 percent for companies with “mature upskilling programs.” Essentially, it all comes down to training.

The report quotes Jonathan Cornelissen, co-founder and CEO at DataCamp, explaining that to close the AI skills gap “requires more than incremental spending on traditional training.” Instead, “it demands a shift from passive, one-off courses to embedded, role-relevant learning that turns data and AI from tools into daily habits.”

Boosting your productivity from AI will really depend on ongoing training. And this means your company really needs to get your staff enthused about learning new skills on a continuous basis. In the light of the Schoox data, this could mean a big overhaul in how your company teaches its workforce.

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