Ask About the Stuck Bits, Not the Wish List

Every autumn, someone in the business sends round a training request form. It lands in inboxes with the best of intentions: tell us what you'd like to learn. The replies come back, a spreadsheet is compiled, and somewhere between the third and fourth meeting the whole thing becomes a list of courses people would quite fancy attending.

I've got nothing against a bit of aspiration. But if you're working with a tight budget — and in most UK teams right now, that is the reality — the wish-list question is a poor use of everyone's time. It doesn't tell you where capability is actually missing. It tells you who is confident enough to ask.

The wish-list problem

Ask people what course they want and you'll get course-shaped answers. Someone asks for a day on Excel. Someone else wants a presentation skills workshop. A third person would like something on project management, though they're not quite sure which flavour.

None of those requests are wrong. They're just not diagnostic. The person who answers first and loudest is often the person who already has a decent amount of development behind them. The quieter colleague — the one who quietly rebuilds the same spreadsheet every month because they've never been shown a better way — may not put their hand up at all.

So the spending skews. Not through malice, but through visibility. And when every pound has to buy a change in behaviour rather than a pleasant day out of the office, that's an expensive way to guess.

Three questions that get closer to the truth

Instead of asking what training someone wants, ask about the work. The answers are messier, but they're far more useful.

1. What's the task you keep pushing to next week?

We all have one. The report that takes longer than it should. The conversation with a supplier that keeps getting deferred. The bit of the job that never quite reaches the top of the list. A stalled task is often a capability clue — not always, but often enough to be worth asking about.

2. Where do you find yourself redoing work or fixing the same mistake?

Recurring errors are a brilliant signal. If three people in the same team keep rebuilding the same monthly pack from scratch, that's not a motivation problem. It might be a skills gap, a process gap, or a bit of both. Either way, it's worth knowing before you book a generic course.

3. What do you avoid asking for help with?

This one takes a bit of trust to answer honestly. But avoidance is where confidence gaps live. Someone who won't ask for help with a system, a client conversation or a piece of analysis is often someone who could benefit from targeted support — and who would never put that on a training request form.

I'd add a fourth, if you've got the time: which part of your job would you least like to explain to a new starter? It sounds like a throwaway question, but it surfaces the areas people feel shaky about. The things we can't teach are usually the things we don't fully own ourselves.

Listen for the verb, not the course title

Once you've got answers, resist the urge to translate them immediately into a course. 'I keep rebuilding the monthly report' could point to a spreadsheet course. It could also point to a template, a process fix, a short mentoring session, or a conversation with the person who originally designed the report.

Ask what a better version of the task would look like. Ask what someone would be doing differently if the gap were closed. That keeps you focused on behaviour rather than attendance.

This matters with apprenticeship levy money too. The levy is a useful pot, but it isn't a reason to buy training you haven't properly diagnosed. Spending it because it's there is still spending. The question isn't 'what can we put through the levy?' — it's 'what change are we trying to see, and is this the most direct route to it?'

Sometimes the answer is a formal course. Often it's something cheaper and closer to the desk: a peer shadowing arrangement, a short internal clinic, a manager who knows how to coach a specific task. A small, well-aimed intervention can beat a big, generic one.

What to do with the answers

Don't publish the wish list and call it a plan. Group the themes, pick two or three genuine capability gaps, and decide what kind of intervention each one needs. Then set a simple measure: what will people be doing differently in eight weeks' time?

And close the loop. If someone asked for a presentation course and you're not running one this year, tell them why — and tell them what you are doing instead. People accept a 'no' far more readily when they can see the reasoning.

The quiet advantage

The best diagnostic conversations happen in one-to-ones, not in a big survey. Give people a bit of time to think. Give managers a few prompts. The answers won't arrive neatly formatted, and that's fine.

Asking better questions costs nothing. It just takes a bit of nerve to stop collecting wish lists and start looking at where the work actually snags.