Corporate learning and development spend has climbed steadily across the region over the past few years. Retention of what actually gets taught hasn’t kept pace — a gap that’s becoming harder for organisations to ignore as training budgets face closer scrutiny.

The pattern behind the gap is fairly consistent:

• Sessions are evaluated on the day, not months later. Post-session satisfaction scores are a poor proxy for whether behaviour actually changed on the job.
• Managers are rarely part of the loop. Skills taught to individual contributors fade quickly without a manager reinforcing them afterward.
• There’s no structured follow-up. A single session with no coaching, check-ins, or accountability point functions as a lecture, not development.

The organisations narrowing this gap aren’t necessarily spending more — they’re measuring success further downstream, weeks and months after the session rather than immediately after it.