Planning for 2026: How best to put your training dollars to work?

Welcome to the January issue of the Learning Dispatch newsletter. Today, we’ll discuss:

• Planning for 2026: Delivering Training (our key trend for this month)
• Five articles on topics ranging from how learners are using AI to the failure of icon design in new software operating systems. And one short video.
• An actionable tech tip on the merge shapes tools in Microsoft PowerPoint (part 2!).

Planning for 2026: Delivering Training

Let’s talk about training modalities—that is, how training is delivered. Specifically, how training might be shared with employees or staff. The start of a new year can be the start of a new budget. How best to put your training dollars to work?

Note, this is a very practical question. Even asking a question about the best way to deliver training to employees assumes that training should be delivered. It presumes that organizations need to train people and training makes a difference in the organization (which it does). Talking about how training should be delivered also sidesteps the all-important question of whether those in the training department are “order-takers” or an essential partner in achieving an organization’s goals.

The core issue remains: People need training to become better at what they do. And training departments provide that training usually delivers it one way or another:

• Self-directed online training
• Webinars
• Animated video
• Virtual instructor-led training
• In-person instructor-led training
• Blended learning

It’s easy to fall into a routine—when the department has the earned experience in creating self-directed online courses, it makes sense to continue to create eLearning. If there was a hard pivot to virtual instructor-led training during COVID (and where wasn’t there?), there are solid reasons to stay with that approach.

Routine

There is power in routine. Not revisiting each decision each time a direction needs to be decided allows you to move forward to address greater and more significant challenges, ones that offer, for example, opportunities for strategic growth. And training needs can be somewhat consistent. New employees need orientation, new software requires instruction, and new processes necessitate sharing.

At the same time, there may be reasons to reconsider the approach. Perhaps feedback indicates that an in-person employee orientation for a far-flung company is more effective at establishing connections and embedding new employees into company culture than a virtual program. Or there may be new technology available that brings the creation of video within the department’s reach.

Questions

The question may be the trade-off. Better retention for in-person training, but the cost of flying employees in. Easier creation of video, but the cost of approving and purchasing new software.

When thinking about using new modalities, additional questions that might be considered are: Are employees getting what they need in the current environment? Is training helping to move the organization closer to its strategic business objectives? (Whether the training department is perceived to move the organization toward its business goals is a different, albeit no less important, question.)

If a different approach is needed, is the infrastructure present to change your delivery modality?* If you’re used to doing virtual instructor-led training over video conferencing, but want to switch to more on-demand delivery methods, do you have a way to host and share videos or eLearning modules? If you’d like to take advantage of AI’s growing capabilities to personalize training, do you have access to AI-driven training systems?

And costs. Is there funding to continue the current approach? (It’s not always the case that resources persist—I’ve seen the financing for a learning management system canceled, and a resulting scramble to adapt SharePoint as a training delivery system.) If a change to instructor-led training is considered, are funds available to pay for instructors? If in-house subject matter experts are doing the training, have opportunity costs been accounted for?

Answers

The best solution to the question of how to deliver training is going to be specific to each organization; its structure, its goals, its people, and the support it can provide for training all play a role.

With, to be sure, a couple of caveats. On the one hand, for the most part, research shows that it’s more important to use evidence-supported learning approaches than any one particular modality. Using feedback, worked examples, spaced learning, retrieval practice, and interleaving make more of a difference than whether training is delivered through video, eLearning, or in an instructor-led classroom environment.

On the other hand, research also shows that delivery methods that support the transfer of skills from the learning environment to the workplace can profoundly impact effectiveness. For example, there’s evidence that using simulation makes for more potent medical training and that aligning the learning and performing context has a significant impact (see, for example, Will Thalheimer’s chapter note on simulating the work context in his CEO’s Guide to Training).  

So, while supporting business objectives, infrastructure, and costs play important roles when considering the trade-offs involved in delivering training, how learners learn must be part of the conversation.

Looking Forward

While training has proven effective and necessary to achieve business goals time and time again, there are limited resources available for training efforts.

Consider the trade-offs and make the best decision possible about how to deliver your training to meet your organization’s needs and goals.

Need help? Reach out to Microassist today.

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*The expected answer might be, “of course!” But you may be surprised at how often organizations have decided to adapt their training to new a modality first, and only then address the lack of infrastructure.

Insight from Everywhere

Note: Links may be behind soft paywalls.

Lynda Gratton’s research at Harvard Business Review describes questions to ask to better understand how AI Is Changing How We Learn at Work.

“Leaders understand that AI is transforming tasks and workflows yet they are far less certain about how it is reshaping the processes through which people develop—how they gain expertise, build empathy, and form identity at work.”

Ben Rand (also at Harvard Business Review) supports the well-established idea that training is effective; in this case, by bringing attention to recent research exploring Why Training Employees Pays Off Twice.

“Business leaders may question whether training programs are worth the cost and time. Yet evidence from a 16-week program shows that upskilling boosts not just employees’ productivity, but the output of their managers, too.”

Oh, Apple. Nikita Prokopov discusses in great detail how it’s hard to justify Tahoe icons in the latest Mac operating system.

“Fast forward to 2025. Apple releases macOS Tahoe. Main attraction? Adding unpleasant, distracting, illegible, messy, cluttered, confusing, frustrating icons (their words, not mine!) to every menu item… It’s bad. But why exactly is it bad? Let’s delve into it!”

Tracy Stine describes a common issue that’s in our power to change, looking at how innovation often fails to address the need to be accessible in The Accessibility Crisis of 2026: What No One Wants to Admit.

“So here are the 2026 accessibility trends no one is talking about but absolutely should be. Because disabled people have been noticing them for years. Everyone else is just catching up.”

Jess Almlie continues her campaign to reinvent training so that it can achieve its full potential, looking forward to 2026: The Year of L&D’s Great Reinvention.

“Instead, I’m issuing a challenge. Not about what will happen, but about what must happen for Learning & Talent Development (L&TD) if we want to stay relevant, valuable, and impactful.”

Video of the Month

For this month’s video, Kim Bahr shares thoughts about ensuring that training is adult friendly.

Tips and Tricks

from Kim Bahr, Microassist Senior Instructional Designer.

Custom Shapes Part 2, PPT

(For part 1, see the Tips and Tricks section of the December 2025 Learning Dispatch)

When developing a presentation or eLearning, you may want a custom shape that fits a specific perspective. PowerPoint gives you the option to edit the points of a shape.

To create a custom shape:

1. Add a shape to a slide and select it.
2. On the Shape Format ribbon, select the Edit Points from the Edit Shape dropdown.
3. Edit the shape to the desired form.

The example below is a shape in edit mode. When editing points, round handles turn to black dots (vertices). You can drag them or click and drag a spot on the border to create your custom image. Edit points use Bezier curves.

In the image below, the laptop screen is an edited shape, for a specific perspective, with a picture fill.  

Before You Go…

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Until next time,
Kevin

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Microassist Public-Sector Staffing Solutions

Fast and Flexible staffing without long-term commitments. Microassist provides vetted, skilled, and trusted instructional designers, document remediation accessibility specialists, training developers, and programmers experienced in public-sector delivery, available today through our Texas Department of Information Resources IT Staff Augmentation Contract (ITSAC).

Let’s talk about your next project!  Email Nivarni Narayan at [email protected].

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