Most Corporate Training Produces Knowledge. Expertise Requires Something Else.

‘Deliberate practice’ is a specific form of structured, effortful skill development defined by a focused performance target, immediate feedback, and repeated opportunities for error correction. Ericsson et al. (1993) established through research across chess players, musicians, and elite athletes that this structure is the primary mechanism through which expert performance develops, and that general experience without it produces only modest improvement over time.

A team member finishes a two day workshop able to explain the framework, walk through the model, and answer questions in a debrief. Three weeks later they’re in exactly the situation the training was designed for, and they freeze, or revert, or do something they couldn’t have explained they would do. The research on how expertise actually develops points at design as the variable, not motivation or content delivery.

The 360 keeps surfacing the same gaps

The 360 review comes back with the same feedback from two years ago. Communication under pressure. Giving hard feedback in the moment. Managing conflict without hours of preparation first. These gaps keep reappearing across review cycles even in organizations that take L&D seriously, even in teams that complete the training. Most L&D programs get evaluated on whether they delivered knowledge. Whether they built a skill is a different question that programs rarely ask in the same breath.

The foundational research is not ambiguous. Ericsson et al. (1993) studied expert performers across chess, music, and athletics and found that the distinguishing variable was not talent and not simply time spent in the domain. It was the quality and structure of practice: whether it was organized around a defined performance gap, whether feedback arrived during or immediately after the performance, and whether the structure allowed for repeated correction.

None of those conditions exist in a standard corporate workshop. Information gets delivered, participants discuss it, and they might try a role play once. The training ends, the feedback loop closes, and six months later someone wonders why the skill didn’t change. The surprise is itself diagnostic. Information delivery and capability building are different processes, and we keep treating one as if it were the other.

What ‘deliberate practice’ actually means

The term gets used loosely, so it’s worth being specific. ‘Deliberate practice’ doesn’t mean “practice a lot.” It has a structure: a precisely defined performance target (not a broad growth area), effort that pushes toward the edge of current ability, feedback that arrives at the moment of error, and repetition until the correct form becomes automatic.

A musician working on a difficult passage doesn’t play the whole piece and hope the hard part improves. They isolate the four bars that aren’t working, slow them down until the fingering is right, receive feedback from a teacher at the moment the error happens, and repeat until the passage is reliable. (It sounds tedious because it is. That’s somewhat the point.) The corporate training equivalent would look almost nothing like what most training calendars contain.

The mechanism in organizational settings

The research gets directly applicable for L&D practitioners in a study by Keith et al. (2016), which followed 132 small business owners in Germany longitudinally and found that self directed deliberate practice predicted entrepreneurial success, with the effect strongest in dynamic environments where work requirements kept changing. In high change contexts, which describes most of the organizations I work with, deliberate practice was among the strongest performance predictors the study identified.

The implication that lands awkwardly: people who actively design their own learning, identify specific gaps, seek feedback on those gaps, and build in repetition tend to outperform people who rely on whatever the organization provides. If your organization runs the workshop and done model, you might be selecting for people who would have improved anyway and calling it your training program.

Köhler et al. (2022) add a useful nuance from their study of expertise development in B2B sales environments. Deliberate practice matters most at the novice stage. More experienced practitioners tend to develop through what the researchers call ‘progressive problem solving,’ meaning being assigned or choosing tasks that are just complex enough to push current capability. The design implication is that a single training model can’t work across experience levels, and most L&D programs quietly pretend it does.

Most training is designed around what’s efficient to deliver. Effective practice is designed around what’s hard to do, and the overlap between those two design priorities is small.

How to actually build this in

Pick one specific skill gap and design a repeatable practice for it rather than waiting for the next workshop. The Ericsson framework is precise: you need a narrowly defined performance target, not a general growth area. If you cannot describe exactly what you’re going to do differently in the next practice session, you haven’t defined the gap narrowly enough. “Improve my feedback skills” is not a target. “Give a correction without softening it into meaninglessness” is.

Build feedback loops into the practice at the moment of error, not weeks later in a review cycle. The timing matters enormously in deliberate practice. Feedback arriving six months later in a performance review doesn’t connect to the error that caused it. If you’re working on a leadership behavior, the useful feedback comes from someone who watched you do it ten minutes ago and can say exactly what happened and when.

If you’re designing L&D programs, separate knowledge delivery from skill practice and schedule them weeks apart. The workshop covers the framework. The deliberate practice sessions, spaced over several weeks, involve repeated performance of one specific skill in isolated conditions with feedback built in. Trying to do both in the same two day event is the design choice that causes most training to produce knowledge that never becomes behavior.

Set up peer coaching pairs to create the feedback loop organizations rarely build in. Two people working on the same skill, observing each other in practice, and giving specific immediate feedback afterward is one of the most effective deliberate practice structures available, and one of the least used. It takes almost no budget and a lot of structure and intention. Almost no one sets it up.

What I keep coming back to

The pattern of training producing knowledge that never becomes behavior isn’t a failure of effort. It’s a perfect outcome for a system designed to deliver information efficiently rather than build capability slowly. We’ve been getting exactly what the design optimizes for, and the design has been wrong for the goal we keep claiming we’re after.

The redesign isn’t especially complicated. It’s harder to schedule than a workshop, and harder to put on a training calendar than a box that gets checked.

What’s one skill you’ve been “working on” for more than a year without a specific practice structure behind it? I’d genuinely like to hear, because I suspect the list would be remarkably consistent across organizations.

If you want to think through what deliberate practice design actually looks like in an L&D program, this is exactly the work we do at Peak Potential. Our team workshops are built around skill repetition and feedback, not information delivery. If you want to talk about what this could look like for your team, reach out here.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What is ‘deliberate practice’ and how is it different from regular practice?

‘Deliberate practice’ is a specific form of skill development defined by four elements: a focused performance target, effort that pushes beyond current ability, immediate feedback, and repeated opportunities to correct errors. Ericsson et al. (1993) established through research across chess, music, and athletics that this structure is what separates performers who keep improving from those who plateau after gaining basic competence. Regular practice, including most corporate training and general experience, rarely includes all four elements at once.

Q: How does an L&D team or manager actually build deliberate practice into a program?

Start by separating knowledge delivery from skill practice and treating them as distinct events. The workshop covers the framework. The deliberate practice sessions, spaced over several weeks, involve repeated performance of one specific skill in isolated conditions with immediate feedback built in. Keith et al. (2016) found that self directed informal deliberate practice predicted performance outcomes even outside formal programs, which means helping employees practice intentionally between sessions matters as much as the sessions themselves.

Q: Doesn’t expertise just come from years of experience on the job?

The research is fairly consistent: not really. Ericsson et al. (1993) found only a weak relationship between years of experience and actual observed performance. Practitioners who spend years performing the same tasks in roughly the same way tend to plateau well below their potential, while those who engage in deliberate practice keep improving. This is one of the most counterintuitive findings in the expertise literature, and it has some of the most consistent empirical support behind it.

Q: Does deliberate practice work differently for experienced employees versus newer ones?

Yes, and this matters for program design. Köhler et al. (2022) found that deliberate practice is most impactful at the novice stage, while more advanced practitioners develop through ‘progressive problem solving,’ meaning taking on tasks just complex enough to stretch current capability. A training design that treats all experience levels the same is likely underserving both groups, and that is a structural gap in most corporate L&D programs.