Employees Want Training More Than Money
But research suggests companies may want to rethink the way the workforce learns.
Bosses have pretty much always assumed that higher pay and promotion opportunities are the primary drivers of employee motivation. New research suggests they may be overlooking something equally important: confidence.
A recent report by Attensi, based on a survey of 505 hospitality workers in the U.S., found that more than half age 25-34 would choose better workplace training over a 5% pay increase. Even more surprising, more than half said their main reason for improving their skills was not to earn more money or secure a promotion but simply to feel more confident and capable in their jobs.
The findings point to a challenge many employers face. While some 9 in 10 workers reported feeling motivated in their current roles, two-thirds said most workplace training focuses too heavily on delivering information and not enough on hands-on practice. As a result, employees often leave training sessions informed but not necessarily prepared.
Employees identified better feedback and coaching, along with more realistic practice scenarios, as the most valuable improvements employers might make. The goal, they suggest, is not just knowledge acquisition but confidence building.
As Trond Aas, CEO of Attensi, explained: “Companies keep designing workplaces around extrinsic rewards because they are easy to measure. But a large number of employees are telling us that becoming genuinely good at their job is more motivating than a slightly bigger paycheck.”
“Measuring real behavior at work is essential for truly understanding knowledge transfer.”
-Philip Huthwaite, 5app
Philip Huthwaite, CEO at the learning and communications platform 5app, noted that for too long employers have been focused on “vanity metrics,” providing merely a surface-level understanding of how training contributes to overall business performance.
5app’s AI skills intelligence platform Helix is used to track and measure skills during actual calls, giving employers and employees access to continuous feedback.
“Measuring real behavior at work is essential for truly understanding knowledge transfer,” he said. “Anyone can say they found a course useful and that they learned a lot, but there’s no way of knowing the real impact of training until you’ve measured how the knowledge or skills are showing up at work.”
The upshot: training should be evaluated not only on completion rates or test scores but also on whether employees actually feel more capable performing their jobs afterward. And while confidence could be a less tangible metric, the report suggests it may be a critical element of employee engagement, performance and retention.
As organizations invest heavily in AI-powered learning tools, the most important outcome may not be how much information employees consume but whether they leave training believing they can successfully apply what they have learned.