What 25 Years as an L&D Buyer Taught Me About What Actually Sticks

Early in my career, I sat across from a vendor who promised their programme would "transform our leadership culture." The slides were polished. The case studies were compelling. We ran a pilot, it went well enough, and we rolled it out nationally.

Six months later, nobody could tell me what had changed.

That wasn't a one-off. Over 25 years of buying, building, and commissioning L&D programmes across organisations like SEEK, Westpac, Vodafone, News Ltd, PepsiCo, and Caltex, I saw that same pattern play out more times than I'd like to admit. Big investment. Good intentions. Impressive launch. Then a slow, quiet fade.

So what actually sticks? Here's where I've landed.

The programme isn't the product. The conversation afterwards is.

The best learning I ever saw didn't happen in a workshop room. It happened in the corridor afterwards. Over coffee. In a one-on-one the following week. The formal programme was just the trigger for a conversation someone had been avoiding, or didn't know they needed to have.

Every intervention I saw genuinely shift behaviour had a mechanism for sustained, structured follow-up. Not a survey. Not a "check-in email." A real conversation between a person and someone who could help them make sense of what they'd learned and actually apply it.

The programmes that disappeared? They treated the workshop as the finish line.

People don't change because you told them something. They change because they felt something.

I've sat through hundreds of facilitated sessions. The ones that created lasting impact almost always had a moment where someone got genuinely uncomfortable. Not reckless or psychologically unsafe. Just that moment where you hear something true about yourself that you weren't expecting.

There's a big difference between being told "you're a high-D personality" and hearing that three of your peers don't feel they can raise concerns with you. One of those is interesting. The other one keeps you up at night. And the one that keeps you up at night is the one that changes behaviour.

Measurement isn't optional, but most of what we measure is useless.

I spent years dutifully collecting Kirkpatrick Level 1 smile sheets. Participants loved the programme. The facilitator was engaging. The venue was nice. None of that told me whether anything had actually changed.

The real question was never "did they enjoy it?" It was "are they doing something differently, and can the people around them see it?" That second part is everything. Self-reported behaviour change is unreliable. If you want to know whether someone is leading differently, ask the people they lead.

I got to the point where I wouldn't back any programme that couldn't answer a simple question: what observable behaviour are we trying to shift, and how will we know if it's shifted?

The vendor relationship tells you everything.

The quality of the vendor relationship is one of the most reliable predictors of programme impact. Not because nice people make better programmes, but because the way a provider engages with you tells you how they think about their work.

The best partners I worked with pushed back. They told me my brief was too broad. They said the problem I'd described wasn't actually a learning problem. They asked difficult questions about what success looked like before they proposed a solution.

The ones who said yes to everything, who customised their pitch to match whatever I'd said in the briefing call, were almost always the ones whose programmes evaporated within a quarter.

Simple beats sophisticated. Every time.

The programmes that stuck were always built around a single, clear idea that people could hold in their heads. One organising principle that made intuitive sense and gave people a lens they could actually use on Monday morning.

That doesn't mean the programme itself has to be basic. You can have depth, rigour, multiple touchpoints. But if the core concept isn't simple enough for a participant to explain to a colleague in two sentences, nothing else matters. The sophistication should sit underneath the simplicity, not on top of it.

So what does all of this add up to?

After 25 years on the buyer side, I stopped buying L&D and started building it. Not because I thought I could do it better than everyone, but because I'd developed a very specific set of frustrations and a fairly clear picture of what I thought was missing.

If you've spent time on the buyer side, I suspect some of this will feel familiar. And if you're currently investing in development programmes and wondering whether they're landing, the questions I'd encourage you to sit with are the same ones I kept coming back to:

What are we actually trying to shift? Can the people around the participant see the change? And does this programme have legs beyond the workshop room?

Those three questions would have saved me a lot of budget, a lot of time, and more than a few awkward conversations with senior leaders who wanted to know what they got for their money.