Only 4% of L&D leaders report on the outcomes of their skill-building programs in terms of business results. That gap is expensive: missed productivity, wasted budget, and programs that can’t justify renewal. The world of employment is going through a lot of changes. Between skill based hiring movements that focus on the competencies and skill sets of candidates, to the ongoing impacts felt from the ‘Great Resignation’. This era of transformation is creating a greater focus on learning and development.
Opportunities for growth are gratefully received but to ensure success, organizations need to consider the common learning and development challenges they may face. In this article we explore the top learning and development challenges and how to solve them.
To meet employee demand, organizations are reassessing their strategies to see how they can integrate skill development and learning into day-to-day experiences. They are shifting priorities to help employees acquire the skills, knowledge, and competencies that are necessary for their professional growth and will contribute towards the success of the organization. The organizations making the most progress are the ones treating credentials not as a reward for completion, but as a data asset that makes skills visible, shareable, and actionable across the workforce.
Organizations that consider implementing training programs should be prepared for the most common challenges:
- Determining training needs
- Allocating resources
- Identifying the best training method
- Keeping employees engaged
- Measuring the impact of training
- Encouraging employee feedback
- Sustaining employee development
- Managing resistance to change
- Actioning applied knowledge
- Awarding employee development
The Top 10 Challenges in Learning & Development and How to Solve Them
How do you determine employee training needs?
Challenge: When implementing a training program, organizations need to determine the specific skills and knowledge that employees need to perform their jobs to the best of their ability. The training program needs to address both the learner’s needs and the organization’s needs as a whole. If the needs of the individual and the organization are not assessed, this can lead to wasted resources and ineffective training.
Solution: To overcome this challenge, organizations need to gain a clear understanding of what competencies are required for each role and align these to their employee’s skill gaps. A practical starting point is a skills taxonomy: a structured list of competencies mapped to roles, proficiency levels, and business priorities. Once that foundation is in place, credentials can be designed to reflect exactly what each role requires, turning your L&D strategy into a verifiable, trackable skills record rather than a training log.
Suggested resources that can help to solve this challenge include:
- What is the importance of a training needs assessment?
- How to complete a skills gap analysis
- How to align job skills training to business needs
How do you allocate resources for a training program?
Challenge: To ensure a high-quality training experience, organizations need to allocate the necessary resources. Designing and delivering development programs can be costly and organizations need to plan effectively to ensure a balance between the quality of training and the resources required. This can be especially challenging for small to medium sized organizations that are dealing with restricted budgets.
Solution: To solve this challenge, organizations must prioritize their training goals and assess the different methods of training delivery available. Cost-effective delivery often means leaning on online platforms and asynchronous formats rather than in-person cohorts, which also makes participation easier for distributed teams. By allocating resources to the prioritized areas and considering digital training initiatives, organizations can deliver high-quality training while better managing costs.
How do you identify the best training method for your employees?
Challenge: Resources aren’t the only limitation to consider when identifying the best type of training method for employee training programs. Organizations also need to pay attention to the specific needs of their employees. There are a variety of training methods available including on-the-job training, in-person training, and online learning or e-learning and everyone responds differently depending on their learning style.
Solution: Employers need to take the time to research and evaluate the different training methods available and talk to their employees to determine how they learn best. Ask them about previous programs they have taken and enjoyed, poor experiences they’ve had with training in the past, and what they’d like to achieve through training. For programs delivered online, skills-based learning approaches (where employees earn a credential for each demonstrated competency rather than just for attendance) consistently outperform passive formats on engagement and retention. Organizations may need to experiment with their learning programs to find the most effective option for their training and development needs.
How do you keep employees engaged in learning and development?
Challenge: Engagement is commonly considered one of the biggest challenges of corporate training. Between managing daily responsibilities, busy schedules, and competing priorities, employees may find it difficult to get started with or complete their training. Learners also become disengaged when the training isn’t interesting or doesn’t appeal to their learning style.
Solution: To overcome this challenge, employers should consider designating specific time within an employee’s day or week for them to spend time training and boost retention. This ensures employees don’t feel they have to juggle their responsibilities and have enough time to dedicate to upskilling. Organizations should find learning content that is engaging to the individual. For example, webinars and interactive quizzes are reported to be more engaging than a worksheet or recorded lecture. Gamification also contributes to increased learner engagement and helps to motivate course completion.
The data backs it up: 60% of learners say they are more likely to complete a course when a digital credential is offered at the end of it - 2024 State of Credentialing, Accredible. Organizations that go further and build credential pathways, sequences of linked credentials showing employees exactly where they can go next, see significantly higher completion rates and re-enrollment.
Frogames, an online training provider, tripled their course completion rate after introducing Accredible digital credentials alongside a gamified learning pathway. Each milestone in the learner journey was credentialed, giving employees a visible record of progress and a reason to keep going. Read the Frogames case study.
Suggested resources that can help to solve this challenge include:
- How to engage students in online learning with digital credentials
- See how credential pathways drive completion and re-enrollment
How do you measure the impact of your L&D programs?
Challenge: Measuring the impact of training can be a significant challenge for organizations as it can be difficult to quantify the benefits of a training program and align them directly to business outcomes. It’s important to measure the impact of training as it enables organizations to better demonstrate the value to stakeholders and make data-driven decisions to adjust programs where necessary.
Solution: To solve this challenge, organizations need to define clear goals and outcomes for their training programs. SMART goals are a great way to define ideal outcomes by setting targets that are Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Relevant, and Timely. Organizations should then use data and metrics to track progress and measure the success of their programs. There are several areas where success can be measured: how satisfied and engaged employees are, the performance of individuals and teams after training, and the impact towards the business goals and bottom line.
IBM found a clear link between training completion and business results: sales reps who completed two or more courses with test scores of 82% or higher closed more details and stayed at the company longer. A separate analysis found that employees with two or more digital badges had 1.5 percentage points higher retention than their peers, a list that translated to $3.56 million in annual savings at that organization. - David Leaser, IBM
Digital credential platforms like Accredible give L&D teams post-issuance analytics that go well beyond completion counts: credential open rates, LinkedIn share rates, referral traffic back to program pages, and top credential influencers within the learner cohort. These are the metrics that help you show leadership what training is actually producing.
Want a practical starting point? Download the free Learner Outcomes Survey template, designed specifically for credentialing programs to track what happens after a credential is issued, from satisfaction to to skill application to career advancement.
How do you encourage employee feedback on training?
Challenge: Another aspect of a successful training program is determining the engagement levels of employees. How can an organization adjust programs to meet the needs of their learners if they don’t know what their employees think about the training sessions? By gathering feedback from employees during and after training, organizations gain insights into what is working effectively and where improvements need to be made. However, encouraging feedback can be a challenge if employees feel uncomfortable making negative comments or feel they can’t influence positive changes.
Solution: To overcome this challenge, organizations need to foster a culture of open communication, where employees feel comfortable sharing their opinions and providing feedback. They need to make sure their employees feel heard and that their opinions matter. Common methods of collecting feedback include surveys, questionnaires, and focus groups. One-to-ones are an effective method of collecting feedback and allow a manager to better understand the employee feedback and elaborate on specific points where required.
Automated post-completion email campaigns make it easier to collect feedback at scale, without adding workload to the L&D team. Rather than relying on employees to proactively respond, a timed follow-up survey, sent one week or one month after credential issuance, captures genuine application feedback at the moment it’s most useful. Accredible’s Email Campaigns feature enables this workflow out of the box.
How do you sustain employee development long-term?
Challenge: To ensure the most impactful and long-lived outcomes of training, it needs to go beyond a one-and-done session. This means organizations need to consider the long-term outcomes of training prior to implementation, alongside the target short-term goals.
Solution: The solution for sustaining employee development lies in encouraging a culture of learning. Organizations must adopt a continuous learning approach by creating opportunities for employees to continue learning, even after the focused training program is completed. This might include planning additional follow-on training programs, providing access to learning platforms, or creating internal mentorship programs.
Credential pathways are one of the most effective structural tools for sustaining development. Rather than treating each training program as a standalone event, pathways link credentials into a progression (micro-credential to intermediate certificate to advanced qualification) so employees can always see where they’re headed next. Organizations that build pathways report significantly higher re-enrollment rates.
See how learning pathways drive enrollment and completion across professional training programs.
How do you manage resistance to change in training programs?
Challenge: Another common challenge faced in the implementation of employee training programs is managing the resistance to change from employees. Resistance happens due to a number of reasons: employees are weary of the unknown, they are uncertain about the benefits, they have a lack of understanding about the changes being made, or they are worried about the impact on their day-to-day responsibilities.
Solution: To reduce and eliminate resistance, organizations need to be open in their communications. They must be proactive in communicating how their employees will benefit, how they will make accommodations for training, and address any concerns their employees have. Organizations also need to be actively listening to their employees while training is ongoing and be prepared and willing to make adjustments to programs to ensure ongoing success.
One of the most effective ways to build buy-in is to show employees what completing training will produce for them specifically. A portable, shareable digital credential that employees can add to their LinkedIn profile and use in job applications gives training a tangible personal value proposition, separate from what the organization gets out of it. When employees can see what’s in it for their career, resistance tends to drop.
How do you help employees retain and apply new knowledge?
Challenge: According to the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve, learners forget up to 70% of what they’ve learned within the first 24 hours after a training experience. The Forgetting Curve describes how the percentage of knowledge retained decreases as more days pass after training. This is a well-documented challenge across education and training and requires strategies to help learners retain knowledge.
Solution: To combat the forgetting curve, organizations need to ensure that their employees have the space to apply their new knowledge in the workplace and put their freshly gained skills into practice. This can happen in a number of ways, for example, creating and assigning experimental projects, tasking employees with sharing their new knowledge with their teams, and launching one-to-one mentorship or coaching programs.
Credentialing knowledge at each milestone, rather than only at course completion, helps reinforce retention. When an employee earns a badge for demonstrating a specific skill, the act of claiming, sharing, and seeing that credential on their profile creates an additional memory anchor. Digital credentials with rich metadata (skills tags, earning criteria, linked evidence) also make the knowledge more tangible and portable, which supports transfer to the job.
How do you recognize and reward employee development?
Challenge: A paper certificate costs money to produce and nothing after. Once it lands in a recipient’s hands, the issuing organization gets no referral, no visibility, no signal that it was ever used. Different outcomes require different types and levels of award. For example, the most common award for professional development is a certificate of completion that the recipient can add to their resume and portfolio. More significant recognition of professional development sees employees gain promotions or awarded bonuses. The result is a recognition model that works for compliance but fails as a growth lever.
Solution: Organizations solve the challenge of recognizing and rewarding employee development by issuing digital credentials. Digital badges and digital certificates enable organizations to issue shareable, verifiable awards to their employees. Because Accredible uses one-click acceptance, employees don’t need to create an account to claim or share their credential. They can post it to LinkedIn, add it to their digital wallet, and share it across 40+ platforms in seconds. That frictionless experience is the difference between a credential that generates referrals and one that sits unopened in an inbox.
The Maker Group moved their credential share rate from under 25% to over 80% after switching from a platform that required account creation to Accredible’s one-click model. Read their story.
Their employees share their digital badges and digital certificates to their social networks, add their digital credential to their LinkedIn profile, and upload their credential to their smartphone digital wallet to use it from their phone. This allows them to showcase their development while increasing visibility for the training opportunities the organization provides its workforce. Organizations communicate the criteria for earning the credential and the value of earning a digital credential to their employees to help boost motivation for training.
For L&D teams that need to show program impact to leadership, digital credentials also provide the post-issuance data that paper and PDF certificates never could: who opened the credential, which platform they shared it to, how many referrals it generated back to the program, and how many learners came back to earn the next credential in the pathway. That’s the evidence that turns a training budget line into a business case.
Organizations can also increase the visibility of their credentialed employees through Accredible’s Spotlight Directory, an issuer-branded directory of certified learners that is searchable by managers, HR teams, and external employers. For internal programs, this makes skill data discoverable across the organization, supporting workforce planning and internal mobility.
How does Accredible help organizations solve L&D challenges?
Accredible is a digital credential platform used by over 2,300 organizations, including Google, IAPP, McGraw Hill, Rutgers, and the University of Cambridge, to issue, manage, and track digital badges and certificates.
For L&D teams, digital credentials address several of the challenges above directly. Accredible enables organizations to:
- Issue digital credentials automatically when an employee completes a course or training milestone, removing the manual certificate workflow
- Track engagement after issuance: who opened the credential, which platform they shared it to, and how many referrals it generated back to the program
- Build credential pathways that guide employees from one learning milestone to the next, supporting continuous development and reducing drop-off
- Surface skills data through internal Spotlight Directories, making it searchable by managers and HR teams for workforce planning and internal mobility
- Give employees a portable, verifiable record of their skills that works on LinkedIn, in job applications, and in digital wallets
Who it’s for: L&D directors, certification program managers, and workforce development leaders at mid-market to enterprise organizations who want credentials to do more than recognize completion, and need data to prove program impact to leadership.
See how Accredible works or book a call with our team to learn more about what digital credentials can do to support your L&D programs.
In Summary
In summary, the challenges faced by organizations looking to implement training for employee development programs are many and varied. From determining the training needs and identifying the best training method, to maintaining employee engagement and measuring the success of training. Organizations need to be prepared to overcome these challenges to ensure their training is effective and sustainable. To do this, organizations need to approach these challenges with a clear and carefully planned strategy and a commitment to fostering a culture of learning and maintaining open communication. This will ensure their employee development program delivers the desired results and contributes to the long-term success of the organization.
The organizations leading on workforce development are the ones that have stopped treating credentials as receipts and started treating them as infrastructure: a layer that makes skills visible, trackable, and useful to both the employee and the organization.
Frequently asked questions
What are the biggest challenges in learning and development?
The most common L&D challenges are measuring training impact, keeping employees engaged, sustaining development beyond a single training event, and proving ROI to leadership. Organizations also struggle with manual certificate workflows that produce no post-completion data, making it impossible to show what training actually changed.
How do you measure the impact of a training program?
Define SMART goals before the program launches, then track a combination of learner satisfaction, knowledge retention, performance changes, and business outcomes. Digital credentials add a measurable layer: open rates, share rates, and referral traffic from credentials shared to LinkedIn give L&D teams data they can present to leadership.
What is the Forgetting Curve and how does it affect training?
The Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve shows that learners forget up to 70% of new content within 24 hours of a training event. Practical application, spaced repetition, and credentialing key milestones (rather than just completion) all help combat this. When employees earn a credential for demonstrating a skill, the act of claiming and sharing it creates an additional memory anchor.
How can digital credentials help with employee engagement in training?
Digital credentials give employees a tangible, shareable reward for completing training. 60% of learners say they are more likely to complete a course when a credential is offered. - 2024 State of Credentialing. Gamified milestone badges and credential pathways that show employees where they can go next further increase motivation and completion rates.
What is the difference between a digital badge and a digital certificate?
Both are types of digital credentials. A digital badge is typically a visual icon that carries embedded metadata (skills earned, assessment criteria, issue and expiry date) and is designed for sharing on social platforms. A digital certificate is a more formal document recognizing completion of a course or program. Accredible issues both, and they can be combined within a credential pathway.
Where to go next
If you’re navigating these challenges now, these resources will help:
- How high-impact L&D teams prove their value to the C-suite: the blueprint for moving from activity metrics to business outcomes
- Measuring learner outcomes that actually matter: free guide and survey template
- How to increase enrollment and completion with learning pathways: practical guide with program examples
- What are digital credentials? The essentials if you’re new to the category
Ready to see how Accredible can help your L&D program work harder? Talk to our team
