The Learning Gap Is Growing Fast — Here's How to Close It
By Enzo Kerr
Enzo Kerr is a training consultant at ONLC Training Centers, a Microsoft partner specializing in AI and technology training. He works with organizations across industries to design and deliver technology adoption programs, from initial discovery through customized curriculum development. This article draws on his experience across hundreds of client engagements.
Over the past several years, I've been in hundreds of conversations with organizations trying to figure out how to get their teams up to speed on new technology. Whether considering AI tools, productivity platforms, or automation capabilities, the conversations are remarkably similar. Leadership has decided to make the investment. They've purchased licenses, rolled out access, maybe sent around a few links to self-paced tutorials. Time comes and goes and a few months later they're looking at their teams and realizing that most of their people are still doing things the same way they were doing them before. There's no change.
The gap between what the tools can do and what people actually do with them is what I think of as the learning gap. I see it in nearly every engagement. The tools are there. The usage isn't. Not yet.
This is what I've learned from those conversations: what works when it comes to technology adoption, what doesn't, and why the most important investment isn't in the technology itself.
The Gap Is Growing
Here's the thing most organizations don't fully appreciate: the learning gap doesn't hold steady while you figure out your plan. It gets worse.
Every month without structured training is another month where people settle into patterns. They do things the long way, the manual way, the way they've always done them, simply because nobody showed them a better option. Those habits become institutional. And like any other kind of debt, the longer you carry it, the more it costs to address.
On top of that, the tools themselves aren't standing still. Product update cycles are getting shorter. New features are shipping faster than they ever have. Entirely new products are entering the market, some completely outclass products that came before, and some of which introduce capabilities that didn't exist at all six months ago. So you have two forces working at the same time: internally, your team is settling into habits and workarounds. Externally, the landscape is moving further ahead of where your team currently is.
I hear a few common responses when I lay this out. "We don't have time for training" is the most frequent. People are busy, calendars are full, pulling a team out of their workflow for a few hours feels like an unbearable slowdown, I get it. But a team that doesn't know how to use its tools effectively is losing time every single day.
Why Most Training Doesn't Close the Gap
So if the gap is growing and waiting isn't a strategy, why doesn't the typical training response fix it?
Most approaches to training are one-size-fits-all. They cover the tools and their features. This type of training is great for proactive learners, but for everyone else it doesn't address the question of "how does this apply to my work?"
Most organizations that have teams spread across completely different functions. Finance, marketing, operations, creative, legal. Their day-to-day work looks nothing alike. When you put all of those people in the same session, show them the same examples, and walk through the same exercises, some of them will connect with the material and most of them won't. It's not that the content is bad. It's that it's not their content.
That pattern holds everywhere. A financial services firm told me directly that workflow relevance had been a persistent pain point in their past training efforts. They'd been through generic sessions before and the material didn't stick because it wasn't anchored to anything their people recognized.
Addressing this problem is exactly why we built SparkLabs, our workflow customization service. Before training begins, we survey the team to identify their actual workflows and pain points, then we build exercises around those results. When the training is delivered, the demonstrations and exercises use problems participants recognize, because they're pulled directly from the team's real workflows. Delivering training like this, that's highly intentional, tailored, and focused, is the best way to help pull your team through to a more complete adoption.
The principle is straightforward: people don't resist new tools. They resist training that feels irrelevant to what they do every day. When someone sees a tool solving a problem they personally deal with, using processes and documents that look like theirs, the learning clicks in a way that abstract demonstrations don't produce. If you're evaluating a training provider and you ask how the content will be made specific to your team's work, pay attention to the answer. If they can't explain how they'll make it relevant, it won't be.
Closing the Gap
Once the urgency is clear and the relevance problem is understood, the question becomes how to actually do this well. The good news is that it's not complicated. It just takes some thought.
There's a real difference between awareness and adoption. An overview session delivered to a large group is valuable for building shared understanding: what is this tool, what can it do, what should I expect? But awareness alone doesn't change behavior. That happens in smaller, hands-on sessions where people are actually working in the tool with instructor support, practicing on scenarios that reflect their real work. Those are different formats that serve different purposes, and treating them as interchangeable is one of the most common mistakes I see. Organizations that feel they are short on time or budget will try to roll out a one-and-done approach for their whole group and miss engaging the people who need training the most.
Sequencing matters too. Organizations that try to cover everything in a single session, from foundations to advanced techniques, end up overwhelming people and diluting all of it. The engagements that work best are phased. You build a solid foundation first, give people time to absorb and practice, then layer on depth. We worked with a federal agency to explicitly scope out their training into phases, with a strong foundation, focused practice sessions, and then more technical tools for power users. Getting the basics right first meant that the trainees had a knowledge and experience structure to build on when they got to those more challenging topics.
Not every organization needs an elaborate multi-phase program. Some teams genuinely need one focused session and that's the right call. But whatever the structure is, it should be a deliberate decision. And the organizations I work with that see the best results are the ones that treat training as an ongoing practice rather than a one-time event. They assess skills regularly, identify gaps, and bring in targeted training to close them before those gaps become permanent patterns.
Start
The tools your organization has invested in are capable. The question is whether your people have the support they need to use them in a way that actually matters for their work. How good the tools are doesn't matter if no one is using them the right way.
That starts with training that connects to what people do every day. Not generic content that could apply to anyone, but applied skills built around real workflows. It means being thoughtful about structure: who needs what, in what format, in what sequence. And it means not waiting until the learning gap has grown so wide that closing it feels like a major undertaking.
Every organization I talk to is at a different stage, and there's no wrong place to start. What matters is making the decision to be intentional about it, and recognizing that the people are the investment, not just the technology.
ONLC Training Centers offers private, instructor-led AI and technology training for teams of all sizes, including customized programs built around your organization's specific workflows. To learn more, explore group training options.