Tacking the skills shortage — why L&D is failing and what to do about it

The Australian economy is in a tough spot right now, and a huge part of the problem is a massive skills shortage. Late last year, businesses were struggling to find the right people for one out of every three jobs.

You'd think that with a talent pool this shallow, training and upskilling your own team would be a top priority. But for too many Aussie businesses, L&D feels like a constant struggle that just isn't making a real difference, despite the $8 billion a year they’re spending on it.

The L&D dilemma

The problem right now is that the L&D options on offer don’t really work. You can hire outside training experts, which give employees access to real expertise but can be expensive. Or you can build your own L&D program in house, which is cheaper but takes ages to build. Trust me on the time aspect of things — I’ve seen businesses take as long as eight weeks to develop just one training module. And then, of course, looking past the time aspect, it’s also difficult to keep modules up to date and scale them effectively across a growing organisation. Not to mention measuring their impact on skills and business results is nigh-on impossible.

When in-house training does more harm than good

While a lot of in-house training isn’t delivering results, the scary part is, sometimes it's actually doing more harm than good.

We've all been there, that mandatory online module you click through as fast as possible, the dense PowerPoint that could cure insomnia, or the information dump that’s clearly more about ticking a compliance box than learning anything useful. When training is laid out like this, it's no surprise people forget almost all of it. In fact, studies have shown that people forget up to 90% of what they're taught in a week if they don't use it.

When training feels boring or irrelevant, people just tune out. It becomes a tick-box exercise. Nobody remembers anything, and the business doesn’t get the skills it needs. And here’s the real kicker — instead of empowering employees, these programmes make them skeptical of any future training. It actively kills the company's chances of building a culture where people are actually excited to learn.

Why businesses struggle to deliver training that truly resonates

So, why do so many businesses get training so wrong? It usually boils down to a big disconnect between what their L&D teams want to achieve and what they're actually set up to do.

First off, making great training content is a real skill. You need to understand how adults learn, how to design an engaging course, and often, how to create decent videos or multimedia content. Most companies just don't have people with those specific skills hanging around. In fact, a recent survey was pretty telling, indicating that only 13% of L&D professionals feel they even have the right skills for the job.

Second, there’s a measurement problem. If you can't see whether the training is actually helping people do their jobs better, you’re just guessing. You have no data to improve the training or prove to the higher-ups that it was worth the money. This is why L&D is often seen as just another expense on a spreadsheet, not a tool for growth.

Finally, as I’ve mentioned before, trying to scale up is a huge headache. That amazing hands-on workshop that worked for a team of ten doesn’t often work for a few hundred people without completely new tech and a different approach. What makes training special for a small group is usually the first thing that breaks when you try to go big.

The path forward: building a competitive advantage through effective in-house upskilling

So, how do we fix this mess and turn training into a company's secret weapon? Australian businesses need to start thinking differently. The old way of just dumping information on people is over. It’s time to create learning that clicks with people because it’s engaging, relevant, and useful.

A big part of this is getting modern tools that let your teams create great content without a fuss. Take ANZ Bank, for example. They were struggling to create the custom training they needed with their team rapidly growing. So, they rolled out an easy-to-use tool that let their team quickly create relevant, engaging digital courses, and the result was cost savings across five regions and they were able to get their new hires up to speed way faster.

But it’s not just about buying new software. The real goal is to weave learning into the day-to-day job so it's there when you need it. We have to start measuring what actually matters - forget about who just “completed” a module. Are people actually learning new skills? Is it making them better at their jobs? Using that kind of data is how you get better results and prove that L&D is worth every penny.

And none of this works without a real learning culture, and that has to come from the top. When people see that their leaders are genuinely invested in their growth, they'll want to get on board, and engagement will naturally follow.

Embracing transformative learning

Let's be clear: Australia's skills shortage and productivity slump are tough problems, but they're not impossible to solve.

The fix is to ditch the old, tired approach to training. By making our in-house upskilling engaging, interesting, and something we can actually measure, Aussie businesses can not only tackle today's economic challenges but also build a rock-solid team for the future.

We have to stop treating training like a chore and start using learning as a core strategy. That's how we'll unlock the incredible potential of our workforce.

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