Managers often lament that their team members aren’t working up to their full potential, and they’re right. The team members agree: According to a study of 4,300 employees conducted by Middlesex University, nearly three-quarters of respondents believed they weren’t achieving their full potential at work because of a lack of development opportunity in their organization. What’s more, in a report published by 24x7 Learning, only 12 percent of employees apply the skills they’ve learned from on-the-job training. There is obviously a disconnect here. Employees don’t feel well-trained, and the training they are receiving isn’t used. To close this gap, it’s important to first establish clear training objectives. These objectives should identify specific goals, and these goals should inform the design and content of the training. It’s also important that training is deployed where and when it’s needed. Oftentimes, training is arbitrary, pulling employees away from the projects they're working on. Once the training is over, employees go back to their projects, and it might be months before they’ll have to use what they were trained on. This lag in deployment contributes a great deal to losses in productivity and decreased skill retention in employees.