You've probably had this thought before: "If we just had more budget, we could train our people properly."
It's a reasonable assumption. Big companies spend thousands per employee on training. Surely they've figured it out.
They haven't.
The Model Everyone Copied Was Never Built for You
The way most companies approach training follows a process designed in the 1970s for the U.S. military. Analyze needs, design content, build it out, load it into a system, and hope people complete it.
That process was built for organizations with large instructional design teams and months of lead time. As L&D analyst Josh Bersin put it, traditional corporate training takes six to nine months to build, while people create learning content on YouTube every day.
Most small and midsize businesses look at that process, realize they can't replicate it, and conclude they just can't do training well. But here's the thing — the process isn't working for the companies that can afford it either.
Big Budgets Aren't Solving the Problem
Companies are spending more per hour of training than ever before. According to ATD's 2025 State of the Industry report, organizations still spent an average of $1,054 per employee on learning, but the cost per learning hour rose 34% in a single year.
Organizations are paying more and getting less. A McKinsey survey found that 87% of companies report having skill gaps now or expect them within five years.
More investment in a broken model just produces more expensive failure.
What This Means for Your Team
Think about a 60-person landscaping company trying to reduce safety incidents. The owner doesn't need a six-month content development cycle. She needs her field crews to understand three specific procedures — using the materials she already has — and she needs to know whether it's actually working.
The traditional model can't deliver that. Not because the company is too small. Because the model was never designed to move fast, stay relevant, or deliver quick, real-world results.
You're Not Behind. The Playbook Was Wrong.
If your training has felt like an afterthought, that's not a reflection of how much you care about your people. It's a reflection of a system that was never built for how you work.
The good news: a completely different approach is now possible — one that starts with what you already know and builds from there.
That's what this blog series is about.
Sources
- EBSCO Research Starters, "ADDIE Model," 2024 — ebsco.com
- Diginomica, "Why it's time to use AI to overhaul L&D," 2025 — diginomica.com
- ATD, "2025 State of the Industry Report," 2025 — td.org
- McKinsey & Company, "Beyond Hiring: How Companies Are Reskilling to Address Talent Gaps," 2020 — mckinsey.com
