Most organizations can point to a full compliance calendar, required trainings, and a learning management system. Yet skills gaps persist, managers struggle with feedback, and “high-potential” employees stall.

The problem isn’t a lack of training. It’s a misunderstanding of development.

Compliance training protects the organization. Development builds capability. These goals require very different approaches.

As evidenced by SHRM’s Talent Management Executives: Priorities and Perspectives report, leaders increasingly recognize upskilling and reskilling as strategic imperatives. Yet many organizations still rely on models designed to transfer information — not change behavior. Watching a video or completing a course may satisfy a requirement, but it rarely prepares someone to do the work differently.

Why Traditional Training Falls Short

Most training programs are designed around exposure: attend the session, review the content, and complete the module. But adult learners don’t develop capability by being told what to do. They develop it by practicing, receiving feedback, and adjusting in real time.

This gap shows up most clearly in areas HR leaders consistently cite as challenges: delivering effective feedback, managing performance, writing defensible documentation, or coaching managers through difficult conversations. These are not knowledge problems — they are skill problems.

And people cannot download skills.

Development Is Effortful by Design

If learning were easy, everyone would already be excellent.

Adult learning requires:

• A clear outcome (what someone must be able to do)
• Explicit expectations (what “good” looks like)
• Practice in a safe environment
• Feedback that confirms understanding

Most organizations do the first two inconsistently. Many skip the third entirely. And leaders often confuse the fourth with evaluation rather than learning.

For example, watching a training on terminations does not prepare a manager to write a legally sound termination memo. Drafting one, receiving feedback, and revising it does.

This is where HR professionals face a quiet but significant challenge: organizations expect many to develop others without having had formal preparation in how development actually works.

Being in HR does not automatically confer expertise in instructional design, coaching, or adult learning. Development is a skill — and like any skill, individuals must learn it.

A Practical Tool to Build Development Capability

One effective way to build development skill — without adding another formal program — is through structured practice. Increasingly, HR professionals are using AI as a thinking partner to clarify outcomes, design practice, and strengthen feedback.

When HR professionals use it intentionally, AI can serve as a practice scaffold — supporting, not replacing, professional judgment, contextual awareness, or accountability.

HR professionals who are responsible for developing others can use the following prompt as a development planning and practice tool.

Development Is a Shared Responsibility

HR should not — and cannot — be the sole owner of development. Managers, leaders, and organizations all play a role. HR’s responsibility is to model how development works, not simply coordinate training.

Organizations that move beyond completion metrics and invest in practice, feedback, and confirmation of understanding build capability that lasts.

Upskilling is no longer optional. But it also isn’t automatic.

Development takes intention — and everyone has to learn how to do it.
 

Toolkit: How to Elevate Employee Skills

This article is courtesy of Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM)