Diagnose the Performance Problem Before You Build A Training

What you'll learn

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Diagnose whether a training request is truly a learning problem before spending time and budget on the wrong solution.
Separate observed performance problems from assumptions about causes and proposed training solutions.
Identify whether poor performance comes from capability, workload, systems, expectations, incentives, or lack of reinforcement.
Define what "good performance" looks like using observable workplace behaviours and meaningful business results.
Use evidence to confirm whether a performance gap is real, recurring, meaningful, and where it actually occurs.
Recommend the right intervention-and explain when training should be used, combined with workplace changes, or not used at all.
Requirements

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No formal prerequisites are required. You only need curiosity about why workplace performance problems happen.
Description

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Your stakeholder asks for training. But how do you know training is actually the answer?
"Our managers need leadership training."
"Our sales team needs negotiation skills."
"Employees need to communicate better."
"We need everyone trained on AI."
These requests sound familiar to almost every L&D, HR, training, and people-development professional. And the natural response is to start designing. But there is a problem. Poor performance does not automatically mean people need more knowledge or skill.
The real issue may be unclear expectations, excessive workload, broken processes, inadequate tools, conflicting priorities, weak incentives, missing reinforcement-or a genuine capability gap that training really can solve.
If we diagnose the problem incorrectly, we can build an excellent training programme and still see little change in workplace performance.
That is exactly what this course helps you prevent. Move from Training Order-Taker to Performance Problem Solver
In this practical course, you will learn how to investigate a training request before jumping to the solution.
You will learn to ask
- What performance should actually be happening?
- What is happening instead?
- What evidence tells us there is a meaningful performance gap?
- What is stopping the required performance?
- Is capability genuinely missing?
- Could training realistically change the situation?
- What else may need to change?
- And ultimately:What should we recommend?
This is not a course about proving that training does not work.
It is about becoming much more accurate aboutwhen training is the right solution, when it is only part of the solution, and when the real intervention belongs somewhere else.
What you will explore
Throughout the course, you will work with realistic workplace situations involving leadership, coaching, communication, customer service, sales, AI use, performance conversations, systems, incentives, workload, and organizational constraints.
YOU WILL LEARN HOW TO:
- Separateobservation, assumption, and proposed solution
- Recognize how the same performance problem can have very different causes
- Turn vague requests such as "better leadership" into observable workplace performance
- Use evidence to distinguish recurring performance gaps from complaints, isolated incidents, and assumptions
- Identify genuine knowledge, skill, judgment, and behavioural capability gaps
- Recognize when tools, processes, workload, information, authority, or systems are preventing performance
- Examine how incentives, priorities, consequences, and leadership attention influence behaviour
- Design learning with workplace transfer and sustained behaviour in mind
- Identify when L&D owns the solution-and when other functions need to be involved
- Make a clear, evidence-based recommendation to stakeholders
PRACTICAL, NOT THEORETICAL
The course connects practical workplace diagnosis with established performance and learning perspectives including Human Performance Technology, Capacity-Willingness-Opportunity, Gilbert's Behavior Engineering Model, Vroom's Expectancy Theory, Baldwin & Ford's Transfer of Training Model, and socio-technical systems thinking.
But you will not be asked to memorize theory.
Instead, each concept is used to improve one thing
the quality of the decisions you make about workplace performance and training.
You will work through realistic cases, diagnostic questions, decision exercises, and activities that you can immediately apply to your own organization.
By the end of the course, you should be able to respond to a training request with much greater confidence
"Here is the performance problem. Here is the evidence. Here is what appears to be causing it. And here is what we should do next."
If you work in L&D, HR, instructional design, corporate training, facilitation, talent development, or performance consulting-and you want to move beyond simply delivering training-this course is designed for you.
Don't start with "What training should we build?" Start with "What performance needs to change, and what is preventing it from happening?"
Who this course is for

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L&D professionals who are tired of receiving training requests without knowing whether training will actually solve the problem.
Corporate trainers and facilitators who want to move beyond delivering courses and become trusted performance partners.
Instructional designers who want to diagnose the real performance need before creating learning content.
HRBPs, Talent and People Development professionals who need to challenge training requests constructively and recommend better solutions.
Learning consultants who want stronger diagnostic conversations with business leaders, managers, and internal stakeholders.
Experienced L&D professionals who want to shift from Training Order-Taker to Performance Problem Solver.
Homepage

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