What to Do When You Don’t Know Where to Start with L&D

Close-up of a group of people sitting at a wooden table in sunlight, taking notes during a meeting or planning session, symbolising collaborative learning and development discussions

You know your team needs better training. The signs are everywhere. New staff are floundering. Managers are constantly answering the same questions. Knowledge is scattered, inconsistent, and hard to find. Everyone is doing their best, but it feels like the same issues keep repeating. And yet when you finally sit down to do something about it, you hit a wall. You are not alone. This is one of the most common points of friction in growing businesses. You recognise the problem. You know training is not working the way it should. But the moment you try to solve it, the whole thing starts to feel overwhelming. Where do you even begin?

There is no shortage of options. You could buy an LMS, outsource content, hire an internal trainer, or build your own courses from scratch. You could audit your entire onboarding process, interview managers about gaps, and start mapping out role-specific competencies. But when you are already stretched thin, that kind of overhaul is simply not realistic.

The good news is that most training systems are not built through massive reinvention. They are built by identifying the moments that matter and improving those one step at a time. If you are not sure where to begin, the answer is almost always the same. Start with the first 30 days. The first month is where training either sets people up to succeed or quietly sets them up to fail. In many companies, onboarding is treated as an orientation checklist. It covers compliance, policies, a few intro meetings, and then people are left to figure out the rest as they go. But that period is far more important than it often gets credit for. The expectations you set, the clarity you provide, and the early wins you support will shape how quickly someone finds their rhythm, how confident they feel in their role, and how long they stay with the company.

You do not need a sophisticated program to improve this. Start by asking one simple question: what should a new hire be able to do by the end of week one, week two, and week four? Not just what they should know, but what they should be able to confidently apply. Then build your onboarding backwards from those outcomes. This gives you a structure grounded in performance, not just information delivery.

Once you have looked at the first 30 days, the next place to focus is where people get stuck. Every team knows. They know which parts of the job trip people up. They know which mistakes get repeated. They know which tasks take too long to learn. The problem is that no one has ever written it down. No one has said, out loud, this is the part where new people struggle. This is what they need to understand better. This is what keeps going wrong.

Instead of guessing or trying to diagnose everything yourself, just ask. Ask your team: when someone new joins, where do they get stuck? Where do they make avoidable mistakes? What is something you always find yourself explaining? This step alone will give you more insight than most audits. You will start to see patterns. The same two or three issues will come up again and again. Those are not just annoyances. They are leverage points. Fixing them will have a compounding impact across every new hire that comes through.

From there, your third step is to define what good looks like.

This is where most training efforts quietly fall apart. Expectations are vague. Standards are not written down. People do the job based on what they observed or what someone showed them once. There is no shared definition of what it means to do something well.

You do not need to document everything at once. Just pick one or two high-frequency tasks and write out the steps. Clarify what quality looks like. Include the common mistakes to avoid, and the why behind the process. When someone new joins, now you have something you can give them. Something they can learn from, practice with, and refer back to.

These three steps might seem simple, and they are. But together, they lay the foundation for a repeatable, performance-based training system. They move you from guessing to designing. They replace improvisation with clarity. And they give your team the tools to do their best work without depending on tribal knowledge or endless re-explaining.

Most companies do not fail at training because they lack software. They fail because no one ever defined the system. No one took the time to slow down and ask the right questions. What do people need to be able to do? Where do they get stuck? What does good look like?

If you are not sure where to start, this is the start.

Clarity compounds. 

And once you begin building training with intention, one small step at a time, the bigger picture starts to take shape.

Previous
Previous

Design Early, Scale Smoothly: Why Training Systems Beat One-Off Events

Next
Next

The Hidden Cost of Tribal Knowledge in Growing Teams