Goldilocks Training Design: Not Too Much, Not Too Little
- Cain Prentice
- Mar 10
- 5 min read
How long should training be? Well, the annoying answer is training should be long enough to do the job, but short enough to fit real life. The real test is: does your training help people do the job without turning into an overblown content firehose or shrinking into a compliance tick box? Both too much and too little training can end up being ineffective. And ineffective training is a waste of everyone's time.
Today we're going to look at how you can avoid too much or too little training. We're going to make sure your training is in the Goldilocks zone — just right.
My name's Cain Prentice from Pukeko Learning Solutions, and today we're going to look at how you can avoid too much or too little training.
Picture this: you pull 12 people out of their job into a full-day training session. The session is pretty dense, exhausting, and doesn't end up making a difference to the way the learners do the job.
That day alone is worth about $5,000 in salary time, or maybe $8,500 if they're senior managers. If you add development costs of $25K or more, you can burn $30K to $40K on training that delivers basically nothing. What a waste.
So why does this happen? Well, it's usually a design problem. Often subject matter experts want to include everything in the training just in case. But it's the job of the instructional designer to ensure that only the relevant content is included. And if the learning outcomes aren't crystal clear, the decision about what's relevant is very hard to make, and the training can become broad and unfocused.
So how do you know if the training is too much then? Well, if it's digital training, perhaps on your LMS reports you might see a lot of incomplete training records. This is because people might have just given up halfway through because it was too long or boring.
Also, you might see disengaged or resentful learners. If it's a virtual session, you might see a lot of participants with their cameras off. Maybe they're doing emails on their other screen and you're basically hosting a webinar full of ghosts.
And probably the most important sign that the training is too much is that there's no learning transfer. Nothing changes on the job.
I've seen 30-minute modules that could have been a checklist.
What about when it's not enough? Well, we can get training that's not enough when it starts with a request like: “We just need to create some training and give it to our people fast.” This is usually for compliance purposes. That's when we can end up with a tick-box training module that people race through and then forget all about by the end of the day — or sooner.
We can also get training that's not enough when we don't have a lot of time to put into the design. We teach the rules, but we skip the crucial decision points where people actually get stuck on the job.
It's one thing to tell managers to manage performance issues early. But when your direct report misses the deadline again, do you have a coaching conversation?
Document it? Adjust the workload? Escalate it to HR? What is the manager going to do?
They'll probably just end up escalating it to HR because they weren't taught what to do first, or something was unclear.
Sometimes we also confuse awareness with ability. There's an assumption that if people have seen it in training, they can do it. But awareness isn't competence.
Just being aware of something doesn't mean you can actually do it.
For example, perhaps staff on a construction site take part in health and safety training about reporting near misses. But back on the site the next day, everyone treats risky behaviour as normal and no one reports those near misses.
Having awareness doesn't mean that staff will have the confidence to interrupt the work, challenge those around them, and fill out a report in the middle of a busy day.
So often all this results in not enough training that feels shallow, like a box-ticking exercise.
So you either pay for the time that staff's bums are on seats when it's too much training, or you pay for rework and retraining when it's not enough. Either way it costs.
It also hurts the credibility of the training team and increases the training workload on the workforce without making an impact on organisational goals.
So what does just right training look like?
Here are two filters that I use to stop training drifting into the other extreme.
First, start with performance outcomes, not topic lists. This means working out what success really looks like on the job after the training. What should people do differently that you could actually observe?
So instead of the outcome being “understand the cybersecurity policy”, it becomes “recognise phishing emails and report them within five minutes of receiving them.”
If you can't link a piece of content to a performance outcome, that's a flag that maybe it shouldn't be in the training.
The second is to run everything through a need-to-know / nice-to-know filter.
If it doesn't change a decision, a behaviour, or a risk outcome, it's probably nice to know. Do people really need to remember this, or can they look it up somewhere else?
If they can, take it out of the module and put it in the intranet or somewhere staff can easily find it when they need it.
Once you've applied those filters, here are a few other practical tools to design training that is just right.
Tool 1: Chunking.
Chunk content for cognitive ease. This means breaking content into smaller pieces, each with a clear purpose and one outcome at a time. This could mean breaking an instructional video into several smaller videos with pauses in between to reflect and apply what's been learned.
Tool 2: Practice activities.
Activities like scenarios or worked examples turn abstract ideas into decisions people actually have to make on the job. So instead of telling them they have to recognise and report phishing emails, give them example emails to practise classifying. Practice makes perfect.
Tool 3: User testing.
It’s a huge help if you can build an early prototype and test it with a small group. This helps you find out what's confusing before you launch it to everyone.
Tool 4: Reinforcement.
Training shouldn't be thought of as a one-time event. It's behaviour change over time. You can build ways to reinforce learning in the flow of work, such as quick reference guides, decision trees, calendar nudges after training, micro-scenarios, role plays in team meetings, templates, and job aids.
So next time someone asks “How long should training be?”, don't answer with minutes. Answer with outcomes.
Long enough to do the job, short enough to fit real life.
If it's a firehose, cut it. If it's a tick box, deepen it.
That's how you get training that actually changes behaviour.
I'm Cain Prentice from Pukeko Learning Solutions, and if you're designing training right now, try out one of these this week and let me know what it changes.
