Why your ERP training program is failing your employees

I have sat in a lot of ERP training sessions over the years. Some were excellent. Most were not. And the ones that failed share a pattern I have come to recognize almost immediately: a vendor trainer at the front of the room, working through the same slide deck they use for every client, at the same pace, with the same examples, regardless of who is sitting in the chairs.

In one room, you might have a warehouse supervisor who has never used enterprise software, a finance manager with 20 years of system experience and a department coordinator somewhere in between. The vendor trainer covers the same material with all of them. Everyone gets a certificate at the end. Almost nobody is prepared to do their job in the new system when go-live arrives.

I want to be clear about something before I go further. In my previous CIO article, I wrote about why organizations should stop blaming their ERP vendor when implementations fail. That argument still stands. But the training problem is a choice the organization makes. Most organizations spend less than 5% of their total ERP project budget on training and then hand that underfunded responsibility to the vendor. The vendor delivers what they were contracted to deliver. The gap between what got delivered and what the organization actually needed is not the vendor’s fault. It is a decision the organization made, often without fully understanding its consequences.

After 25 years of leading enterprise software implementations and based on the doctoral research I conducted studying ERP implementations in small businesses, I am convinced that the organizations that get training right share one thing in common: they build the expertise internally rather than importing it.

Why vendor training falls short

Vendor trainers know the software. That is not in question. What they do not know is your business: your processes, your workflows, your data, your terminology, your culture and the specific ways your organization will use the system once it is live.

That gap matters more than most organizations realize. Research consistently shows that inadequate training is one of the primary drivers of ERP implementation failure, not because training did not happen, but because the training that happened did not connect the system to the work. Employees left those sessions knowing what buttons to click without understanding why those buttons mattered to their specific job.

Generic training has a structural problem: it is optimized for coverage, not relevance. The goal is to ensure every employee has seen every feature. The result is that employees spend significant time learning functionality that does not apply to their role, while the functionality that does apply gets the same shallow treatment as everything else.

A finance manager sitting through a session on shop floor production tracking is not learning anything she will use. A warehouse supervisor learning about financial journal entries is in the same position. Both leave the session technically trained. Neither leaves prepared.

There is also a timing problem. Vendor training typically happens in a compressed window before go-live, delivered as a series of sessions rather than a progression. Research on learning retention suggests that training delivered weeks before it is needed, without reinforcement or practice, is largely forgotten by the time employees need to apply it. The result is a go-live day where everyone attended training and almost nobody feels ready.

What internal expertise looks like in practice

In my doctoral research, I interviewed six IT managers from small businesses who had each led successful ERP implementations. Five of the six identified role-based, department-specific training as essential to their outcome. What distinguished their approach was not that they spent more on training. It was that they built the training capability inside the organization rather than contracting it out.

The approach that worked most consistently was identifying one person from each affected department early in the implementation, before configuration even began. That person became the departmental expert: involved in design decisions, consulted on how their team’s processes mapped to the new system and ultimately responsible for either delivering training to their colleagues or co-leading it alongside a formal trainer.

This is sometimes called a super user model, and the research supports its effectiveness. But what I observed in the implementations that worked goes beyond the mechanics of the model. The departmental expert brought something a vendor trainer cannot: credibility. When the warehouse supervisor learns the receiving process from someone who has worked in that warehouse, who understands the exceptions and the edge cases and the way things truly flow on a busy day, the training resonates in a way that a generic session never can.

There is also an ownership dimension that is easy to underestimate. Peer-based training led by internal super users helps employees connect system steps to their daily responsibilities in ways that outsider-led training rarely achieves. The departmental expert has skin in the game. They are going to use this system too. That shared stake changes the dynamic in the training room and sustains the support relationship long after the formal training is over.

I have seen this play out in both directions. In implementations where the organization invested in building internal expertise early, go-live day was hard but manageable. Questions went to the departmental expert, who could answer them in the language of the department. Issues surfaced quickly because someone in each area was watching for them. Adoption stabilized faster because the support was embedded in the team rather than accessible only through a help desk ticket.

In implementations where training was handed entirely to the vendor, the pattern was different. Go-live revealed gaps that training had not covered. The vendor’s support engagement was winding down. The organization had no internal expertise to draw on. Employees reverted to workarounds. The system went live but never fully took hold.

How to build internal training capability before go-live

The organizations that got this right did not wait until the training phase to think about training. They started building internal expertise at the beginning of the project. Here is what that looked like in practice.

Identify departmental experts early

Select one person from each affected department before configuration begins. Choose people who are respected by their colleagues, have a solid understanding of their department’s processes and are willing to invest extra time in the project. This is not a small ask. Make sure they and their managers understand the commitment and that the contribution is recognized.

Involve them in the implementation, not just the training

The departmental expert should participate in process design sessions, configuration reviews and user acceptance testing. By the time training begins, they should understand the system deeply enough to explain not just how it works but why specific decisions were made. That context is what makes internal training credible.

Design training around the job, not the system

Training content should be organized around realistic work scenarios specific to each department, not around the system’s feature set. The finance team trains on how to process their transactions in the new system. The warehouse team trains on how to manage their receipts and inventory. Connect every step to the work employees actually do.

Plan for post-go-live support, not just pre-go-live training

The weeks immediately after go-live are when training becomes real and when the gaps in pre-go-live preparation surface. The departmental expert should have a defined support role in that period: available to their colleagues, connected to the project team and empowered to escalate issues that need resolution. This is not a minor detail. It is where the investment in internal expertise pays its most important dividends.

None of this requires a large budget or a dedicated training function. It requires early decisions about who will own the training relationship inside each department and the organizational commitment to support those people through the implementation, rather than treating training as a final phase activity.

The vendor knows the software. That knowledge is valuable and should not be wasted. But your people know your business, your processes and the way work flows on any given day. The question is not whether to use your vendor’s expertise. It is whether you are also building the internal expertise that turns a trained workforce into a prepared one. The organization that does both will not just go live. It will thrive.

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