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I'll admit, that might sound like a strange question coming from me.

After all, I lead a learning and development company. My team and I spend every day helping organizations build leaders, improve performance, and create better employee experiences. If anyone should be advocating for more training, it should be me.

But that's exactly why I'm writing this.

Over the past several years, we've spent countless hours researching what actually drives performance improvement. We've worked with organizations across industries, observed coaching conversations, analyzed performance data, and studied why some employees consistently excel while others struggle despite receiving the same training. What we've learned is both simple and uncomfortable:

Training alone doesn't create performance.

That's not to say training isn't important. It absolutely is. Training creates awareness. It builds foundational knowledge and introduces skills and concepts people need to succeed. But somewhere along the way, many organizations began expecting training to do something it was never designed to do which is create lasting behavior change by itself.

And that's where the disconnect begins.

Organizations invest heavily in onboarding, refresher training, coaching programs, learning platforms, and leadership development. Employees complete courses, pass assessments, and check all the training boxes. Yet when performance metrics don't move—or don't stay moved—we're left wondering what happened.

The truth is, training and performance are not the same thing.

For years, we've operated under the assumption that if people learn something, performance will naturally improve. But learning doesn't automatically create behavior change. Knowing what to do and actually doing it during a difficult customer interaction are two very different things.

That's where many traditional training programs fall short. 

I've come to appreciate this challenge even more because of the unique vantage point we have at Ulysses Learning. Every year, we have the opportunity to review new hire curriculum from contact centers across industries. While the products, processes, and systems may differ, one theme shows up again and again.

Looking at some training programs, you'd think we're hiring people with photographic memories. New hires are expected to learn dozens of processes, memorize codes, navigate multiple systems, remember regulatory requirements, understand products and services, and often do it all across five or more different platforms. Just thinking about the amount of information they learn over a 10-12 week time period leaves me exhausted.  In many organizations, success seems to depend on how much information someone can retain in a relatively short period of time.

The problem is, that's not how people learn.

What typically happens is information overload. New hires leave training with their minds packed with information they are desperately trying to retain. Then reality sets in. Once they begin taking calls, they naturally start discarding information they don't use regularly. It's not a failure of the employee but simply how the human brain works. Learning research has consistently shown that people forget information that isn't applied or reinforced. In fact, studies on the "forgetting curve" demonstrate that without practice, retention declines rapidly over time.

The irony is that we often design training as if recall is the ultimate goal, when in reality, recall is rarely the job.

Think about your best contact center agents. What makes them successful isn't that they can recite every process from memory. It's that they can think critically, ask the right questions, navigate available resources, and confidently find the right answer when they need it.

The real question isn't, "Can they remember everything?"

The real question is, "Can they solve the problem in front of them?"

Recently, we interviewed two new hires who were training for the exact same healthcare customer service role. One came from a hospital environment, where they had worked as an answering nurse. The other came from a beverage company and admitted that his favorite pastime was gaming. If you were placing bets on who would be most successful, most people would probably choose the nurse.

Surprisingly, the top performer in training was the gamer.

It wasn't because he knew healthcare. It was because he was comfortable navigating multiple systems, learning complex workflows, recognizing patterns, and memorizing a large number of codes and shortcuts. Years of gaming had trained him to process information quickly and move efficiently between different environments. Meanwhile, the healthcare expert had strong industry knowledge but faced the same challenge many new hires do—information overload.

The lesson wasn't that healthcare knowledge doesn't matter. It was that success in today's contact center is often less about memorizing every answer and more about knowing how to find, interpret, and apply the right answer in the moment. The agents who thrive aren't necessarily the ones with the best memory; they're the ones who can think critically, navigate resources confidently, and solve the problem in front of them.

In today's contact center environment, knowledge changes too quickly and complexity is too high to expect agents to memorize everything they'll ever need. Instead of building training around memorization, we should be designing experiences that build critical thinking and teach individuals how to problem solve while using their resources. The goal is not to create employees who can recall every answer. The goal is to create employees who know how to find the answer and deliver a great customer experience.

That's a fundamentally different skill set and one that's far more valuable in the modern contact center.

Think about how we learn almost any important skill in life. Nobody becomes a confident driver by reading a manual. They improve through practice.  In fact, just ask my dad.

When I was learning to drive in Florida, driver's education was mostly classroom-based. Apparently, taking teenagers out on actual roads was considered too much of a liability. So we sat in a pretend car, learned what all the buttons did, studied the rules of the road, and talked about driving. What we didn't do was actually drive.

Then one day they sent us on our way to the driver's license office.

My poor dad was completely unprepared for the experience of riding shotgun while I attempted to put all that "learning" into practice for the first time. Let's just say it became abundantly clear that knowing where the turn signal was and understanding right-of-way were very different from navigating real traffic with actual cars, actual pedestrians, and actual consequences.

Looking back, that's exactly how many contact center training programs operate today. We spend weeks teaching people what the buttons do, where the information lives, and what the process says. Then we put them in front of a live customer and hope everything comes together. Sometimes it does. More often, that's when the real learning begins.

Because capability isn't built by learning about the experience. It's built by having the experience.

The same principle applies in contact centers.

Real learning happens when employees are placed in situations that closely mirror the reality of their jobs. It happens when they make decisions, navigate challenges, learn from mistakes, and try again. That's when knowledge becomes capability and when confidence develops. And that's when performance starts to improve in a meaningful and sustainable way.

This is one of the reasons simulation-based learning has become such an important part of modern workforce development. Simulation allows employees to experience realistic customer scenarios in a safe environment before they face those situations with actual customers. Instead of talking about empathy, they practice it. Instead of discussing objection handling, they use it. Instead of memorizing a coaching model, they apply it.

Most importantly, they build judgment. And judgment is what separates knowing from doing.

At Ulysses Learning, this realization has shaped much of our research over the past several years. We've looked closely at what actually drives lasting behavior change, and the answer isn't more content. It's more opportunity to apply content. The most successful organizations don't necessarily train more than everyone else and instead they create more opportunities for employees to practice and build confidence before performance matters most.

For leaders, this creates an important shift in thinking. The goal isn't simply to ask, "Did they complete the training?" The better question is, "Can they successfully apply what they learned when it matters most?"

Those are two very different measurements.

If we truly want better outcomes, we need to stop viewing training as the finish line and start viewing it as the starting point. Training creates awareness while practice creates capability and application creates performance.

So if we're spending more on training than ever before and still struggling to achieve the results we want, perhaps the answer isn't more training. Perhaps the answer is creating more opportunities for people to apply, practice, and refine what they've already learned.

Because in the end, customers don't experience what our employees know.

They experience what our employees do. And that's where performance really lives.