For staff development to be effective it must involve the transfer of new knowledge, skills and behaviours into day-to-day work. This may be a narrow definition, but it emphasises the important point that the main purpose of development in a business context is the performance improvement realised afterwards.

This means that before your staff embark on a programme of development, you must start off with a very clear picture of how the trainee will use their new learning after the event or programme. It is a well-voiced opinion, and a worrying statistic, that people will forget approximately 70 per cent of everything they learn on a training course within two weeks of completing it.

Only if we begin with a clear understanding of our goals for the development, the role that we play in helping the learner to internalise the new knowledge and skill and then transfer this back to the workplace will we positively impact on this figure and ensure that the development is truly effective. The sad reality is that people all too often focus on what happens before and during a development programme €“ but less so on what happens after it. This is a lost opportunity.