The most expensive development programme isn't the one with the biggest invoice.
It's the one nobody uses. Or, in some ways worse, it's the one everybody dutifully completes and nobody ever applies.
I think this is one of the most under-discussed truths in this entire industry, because it doesn't show up cleanly on a budget line. Nobody sends an invoice labelled "wasted."
Where the waste actually hides
Instead, the waste hides inside things that look completely normal on paper.
Unused licences sitting dormant on a platform nobody logs into any more. Duplicated vendors doing overlapping work because two departments each bought their own solution without knowing the other existed. Low participation in a programme that technically launched successfully. Weak follow-through after the initial excitement of a kickoff wears off.
None of these things individually looks like a crisis. Together, quietly, they're where the real return on investment disappears.
I've watched organisations spend six figures on a leadership programme, celebrate the launch, run a great first cohort, and then watch attendance and engagement slowly erode over the following year until the whole thing is technically still "active" but functionally dead. The money's already spent. The results never fully materialised. And because nobody was watching the usage data closely, nobody caught it in time to course-correct.
"Invisible waste is still waste. It just doesn't ask to be noticed."
An audit you can run this quarter
The uncomfortable part of this problem is that finding it is not technically hard. It's organisationally hard, because someone has to be willing to surface an answer that makes a colleague's decision look bad.
If you want to know where your development spend is actually going, four questions will get you most of the way there.
What are we paying for per seat, and how many of those seats logged in last month? Not "have been provisioned." Logged in. The gap between licences purchased and licences used is usually the fastest money any L&D function can recover, and it recovers at renewal rather than requiring a new decision.
Which vendors overlap? List every development supplier across every department — including the ones bought on a departmental card rather than through procurement. In most organisations above a few hundred people, at least two are doing substantially the same thing for different populations, at two different prices.
What happened ninety days after each programme ended? Not the completion rate. Whether anything was still being applied a quarter later. If nobody can answer this for a given programme, that programme is currently unmeasurable, which means it is also undefendable.
What are we still funding out of habit? Every organisation has at least one line item that renews annually because it always has. Naming it is usually the single largest saving available, and the hardest one to say out loud.
The fix is simple to state and uncomfortable to implement
Companies should pay for what is actually being used. They should invest more in what is producing real, visible results. And they should stop funding what isn't, even when stopping feels like admitting a mistake.
Measure what is used. Optimise what works. Stop paying for what doesn't.
It sounds almost too simple to be useful advice, but I'd argue most organisations aren't doing even this basic version of it consistently. Not because they don't know how, but because each individual step requires someone to say that a decision made eighteen months ago isn't paying off — and there is rarely a designated person whose job it is to say that.
If you want this to happen, make it someone's job explicitly, and make the reporting cadence quarterly rather than annual. A year is long enough for a failing programme to consume its entire budget before anyone notices.