The Importance of Ongoing Platform Training in a Changing Digital Landscape

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Enterprise platforms are not static products. Workday, SAP, Oracle, Salesforce, and their peers push updates on a regular cadence—new features, redesigned interfaces, enhanced security controls, and expanded automation capabilities. Each update shifts the baseline of what the platform can do. But if the people using the system are still operating on knowledge from the original implementation, the organization falls further behind with every release cycle.

Ongoing training is not a nice-to-have. It is the mechanism that keeps the gap between platform capability and organizational competency from widening over time.

The Knowledge Decay Problem

Initial implementation training addresses the system as it exists on day one. From that point forward, several forces erode the organization’s effective use of the platform:

• Feature drift: Platforms evolve faster than user knowledge. Quarterly releases add capabilities that go unnoticed because no one is responsible for evaluating and communicating them to end users.
• Turnover and role changes: New employees learn the system from colleagues who may themselves be using workarounds rather than best practices. Over successive generations of informal knowledge transfer, the gap between intended and actual usage compounds.
• Workflow evolution: Business processes change—new products launch, organizational structures shift, compliance requirements tighten. The system configuration that supported the original process may no longer reflect how work actually happens.
• Confidence erosion: Users who encounter unfamiliar screens or features tend to avoid them rather than experiment. Over time, this avoidance narrows the effective functionality of the platform to a fraction of its capability.

Training is not an event. It is a system—one that requires the same ongoing attention as the platform it supports.

What Effective Ongoing Training Looks Like

Continuous training programs that actually drive adoption share several characteristics that distinguish them from occasional refresher sessions:

Release-Aligned Training

Every platform update should trigger a structured evaluation: what changed, who is affected, and what do they need to know? Training should be delivered before or immediately after the release, focused specifically on the changes that impact each role. This prevents the accumulation of unknown features that users discover accidentally—or never discover at all.

Role-Specific Skill Assessments

Periodic assessments identify where knowledge gaps exist before they manifest as errors or workarounds. These assessments should be lightweight—short scenario-based exercises rather than formal tests—and their results should directly inform the next round of training content.

On-Demand Learning Resources

Not all training needs to be scheduled. Searchable knowledge bases, short instructional videos, and annotated process guides allow users to find answers at the point of need. The most effective resources are task-specific: “How to submit an off-cycle payment” rather than “Overview of the payroll module.”

Adoption Metrics and Feedback

Tracking how users interact with the platform reveals where training is working and where it is not. Low adoption of a recently released feature may indicate a training gap. High error rates on a specific workflow may point to a confusing configuration rather than a user knowledge problem. Distinguishing between these causes requires data, not assumptions.

The Cost of Neglect

Organizations that skip ongoing training pay for it in less visible but equally real ways:

• Stagnant processes: Teams continue using outdated methods because they do not know better alternatives exist within the platform.
• Shadow systems: Users build workarounds in spreadsheets and personal tools, fragmenting data and creating audit risks.
• Higher support costs: Repetitive support tickets for issues that training would prevent consume IT and operations resources.
• Diminished morale: Users who feel unsupported by their tools become frustrated and disengaged, which affects retention as well as productivity.

Conclusion

A platform is only as valuable as its users’ ability to leverage it. Organizations that build ongoing training into their operational rhythm—aligned to release cycles, informed by usage data, and delivered in role-specific formats—consistently outperform those that treat training as a one-time implementation expense. The platform will keep evolving. The question is whether the organization’s capability will evolve with it.