Beneath the Headline | Edition 003
The human impact behind the business story.
The Headline
In July 2025, Gallup published research examining the barriers preventing employees from pursuing professional development. Only 45% of U.S. employees reported participating in education or training to build new job skills in 2024. Among employees who identified obstacles, 41% cited job-related time demands, 25% pointed to personal or family responsibilities, and 20% reported insufficient learning opportunities offered by their organizations.
Perhaps more revealing, Gallup found that 89% of chief human resources officers identified time away from job responsibilities as an obstacle to employee development.
Organizations recognize that employees need opportunities to develop, yet the demands of their existing jobs can prevent them from pursuing those opportunities.
And that raises a question I think executives should be asking more often.
When employees aren't using a benefit, do organizations celebrate the savings or investigate the disconnect?
Beneath the Headline
Organizations have offered tuition reimbursement, leadership development programs, technical training, and continuing education assistance for decades. These programs can provide meaningful value, but their existence doesn't necessarily tell us whether employees can access them or whether the investment is accomplishing its intended purpose.
The International Foundation of Employee Benefit Plans' 2024 Education Benefits Survey found that 92% of responding organizations offered some form of educational benefit. Yet 70% reported that no more than 5% of employees participated in their tuition reimbursement programs.
Low participation doesn't automatically mean a benefit is ineffective. Not every employee wants to pursue a degree, and some programs are intentionally designed for a relatively small population. But when utilization is lower than expected, organizations should understand why.
Consider a hypothetical organization that budgets $2 million annually for employee development but spends only $600,000 because participation is lower than anticipated. From a financial perspective, the organization came in $1.4 million under budget. From a human impact perspective, the organization may not know whether employees didn't need the investment or couldn't access it.
Perhaps the programs don't reflect employees' interests. Perhaps employees don't know what's available. Or perhaps they want to participate but cannot accommodate the scheduling, financial, or operational requirements.
Each explanation has different implications. Yet without examining the reasons, an organization may interpret unused funding as unnecessary investment. This is where I think executives need to distinguish between offering an opportunity and investing in employee growth.
Offering an opportunity means a program exists. Investing in growth requires considering whether employees can realistically participate and whether the opportunity contributes to meaningful development.
A benefit can be available without being accessible. And money can be spent without meaningful development taking place.
The Human Impact
Consider two employees working for the same organization. One works in a corporate office with a predictable schedule and the flexibility to attend a conference or participate in a development program. The other works in a distribution center where staffing requirements, shift schedules, and operational demands make time away considerably more difficult.
Both employees may qualify for the same professional development opportunities. But their ability to use them can be very different.
For the distribution employee, pursuing a three-day certification might require schedule adjustments, manager approval, coverage arrangements, and upfront expenses. Even when reimbursement is available, the employee may not have the financial flexibility to pay first and wait to be reimbursed.
The organization can accurately say the benefit is available to both employees. What it cannot necessarily say is that both employees have a comparable opportunity to participate.
These barriers aren't always the result of poor intentions. Employers have legitimate operational requirements, and employees have personal responsibilities that organizations cannot always accommodate. But employers influence many of the conditions that determine whether participation is realistic.
And those conditions can shape more than whether someone attends a conference or earns a certification. They can influence who develops new capabilities, who becomes eligible for future opportunities, and who has access to career growth.
An employee who cannot step away from their current responsibilities to develop new skills may eventually find that those same responsibilities have limited their ability to pursue something different.
Employees still have a responsibility to take ownership of their development. Not everyone wants to advance, pursue additional credentials, or participate in every opportunity offered. But organizations should be careful not to interpret limited participation as a lack of ambition without understanding the circumstances behind it.
When access to development depends on an employee's work environment, the same benefit can produce very different opportunities for growth.
Before It Becomes Your Headline
Does every organization need to increase its development budget or replace existing programs? Of course not. Some benefits may be serving their intended purpose, even when participation is limited. Others may need to be redesigned, better communicated, or delivered differently.
The important question is whether leaders have enough information to know the difference.
When evaluating development investments, I would encourage executives and HR leaders to examine four areas:
- Relevance: Do the opportunities offered reflect the capabilities employees want to develop and the skills the organization needs? Are employees being asked what would be useful, or are offerings based primarily on longstanding programs and assumptions?
- Accessibility: Can employees realistically participate? Consider work schedules, staffing requirements, manager support, eligibility criteria, upfront costs, and differences between corporate, frontline, hourly, and shift-based employees.
- Utilization: When participation is low, does the organization investigate why? Distinguish between lack of interest, lack of awareness, and barriers that prevent interested employees from participating.
- Impact: What happens as a result of the investment? Look beyond dollars spent and enrollment numbers to examine capabilities developed, employee feedback, career opportunities, and improvements connected to the organization's workforce needs.
These considerations don't require organizations to fund every development request or guarantee participation. They require leaders to understand what they're trying to accomplish and whether their current approach is working.
In some cases, the answer may be additional funding. In others, it may be protected learning time, more flexible scheduling, manager support, onsite training, or redirecting existing resources toward opportunities employees can actually use.
A lower-cost program that employees can access and benefit from may accomplish more than a generous benefit that remains largely unused. Conversely, high participation doesn't necessarily mean an investment is successful if employees aren't developing meaningful capabilities.
The goal shouldn't be to spend more simply to demonstrate commitment. It should be to understand whether the investment is making a difference.
The Closing Thought
Organizations regularly invest in the resources they need to improve performance. They upgrade technology, maintain equipment, redesign processes, and introduce new systems when business demands change. Those investments are evaluated not simply by whether money was allocated, but by whether they help the organization accomplish what it intended.
People aren't equipment or technology. Their development involves individual ambition, opportunity, and circumstances that cannot be reduced to a financial calculation. But that makes it even more important for leaders to understand whether their investments in employees are creating meaningful opportunities for growth.
Return to the organization that budgeted $2 million for development and spent only $600,000.
The financial report may show $1.4 million in favorable spending. But before celebrating that result, executives should want to know what happened to the development opportunities the organization intended to provide.
Did employees choose not to participate? Were the programs misaligned with their needs? Or did the organization create opportunities that its own operating conditions made difficult to pursue?
Those answers matter because employees are still being asked to adapt to new technologies, strengthen their capabilities, and meet evolving performance expectations.
We cannot continually raise our expectations of people without examining what we're doing to help them meet those expectations.
An underspent development budget isn't automatically a problem. But neither is it automatically a success. The amount an organization spends tells leaders what the investment cost. It doesn't necessarily tell them what the investment accomplished.
So, before celebrating the savings, consider whether the people the investment was intended to support had a meaningful opportunity to benefit from it.
Because the question isn't whether every employee will take advantage of what you offer.
It's whether the investment you're making in your people reflects the performance you're expecting from them.
Stay Human,
LaShawn Davis
About the Author
LaShawn Davis is the Founder and CEO of The HR Plug, an employee and labor relations advisory firm, and the creator of The UNPLUG Experience. Drawing on her experience advising organizations and leading employee and labor relations across complex workforces, she writes about the human impact of business decisions, workplace culture, and the leadership responsibility to humanize work.
Reader Correspondence
Beneath the Headline explores the human impact behind business stories, examining how organizational decisions shape the experiences of employees and what leaders can learn from them.
Have a perspective to share, a question about this edition, or a business story you think deserves a closer look? Contact the author at hello@lashawndavis.me.