Common Mistakes in Corporate Training and How to Avoid Them: Insights from Alawar

Corporate training is a powerful tool for employee development. Its effectiveness largely depends on proper organization. Alawar shared with App2Top their experience in organizing a time management training session. They discussed the challenges they faced, how they addressed them, and highlighted the risks that should be considered in such training sessions.

This article was supported by the educational service WN Academy, where you can order team training with an experienced expert on any topic.

The author of the material is Svetlana Ignatenko, Head of HR at Alawar.

Svetlana Ignatenko

Let me begin with a brief introduction about us. Alawar is a video game publisher and developer founded in 1999. The company's portfolio includes the Beholder series, Do Not Feed the Monkeys, Karate Survivor, Necrosmith, Wall World, and many other games, including casual franchises. We handle everything from analytics and marketing to localization and testing to ensure each game reaches its full potential.

Now, regarding our experience with time management training sessions.

Mistake #1 — Choosing a Training Format Without Considering Context (Internal vs. External Trainer)

We avoided this mistake.

Attempting to conduct training with in-house staff can lead to poor preparation quality, overloading the team, and distracting from core tasks. Not every company has employees with expertise in adult learning methodologies and extensive training experience.

We opted for an external trainer after thoroughly reviewing their experience, and it paid off. To ensure you pick the right contractor, gather recommendations, attend the trainer’s free events, and review their program. In our case, I followed the trainer's channel, participated in a free webinar, and saw real client feedback.

Mistake #2 — Heterogeneous Group Composition

We included employees of different levels (both top managers and rank-and-file specialists) in the group. We surveyed participants, finding significant variations in their existing knowledge level of the topic.

The survey revealed that part of the group was already proficient and rated their time management skills as high (a ten), while there were newcomers who rated their knowledge at three to four.

What's the challenge? Experts might get bored, while beginners need basic tools as well.

We decided to keep the group intact but conduct the training differently. Our trainer restructured the program to help participants formulate goals for the training: to organize, systematize knowledge, or learn something new. It was also important to show that some in the group were eager to learn the basics.

Mistake #3 — Panicking After Intermediate Feedback on the Training

In discussions after the first session, we heard, "I already know all of this." The logical question arose, "What should we do?" We had several options:

• urgently revamp the entire program;
• urgently change the trainer;
• cancel the training.

Together with the trainer, we decided to actualize the area of ignorance, broke time management down into components, and demonstrated that even experts might have a skill that could be lacking, such as maintaining energy levels (remaining effective at work and personally without sacrificing one for the other). Plus, we understood that knowing doesn't equal doing.

Important! We acted without pressure and categorically: if you are satisfied with the results, change isn't mandatory. If improvement is desired, approach new knowledge as an experiment: try implementing a new practice for three to five days and see if changes occur.

Suddenly, alongside sevens and tens, twos appeared among the ratings!

This prompted us to gather feedback for course correction. The HR team privately surveyed students who rated the sessions at two to understand how the training was going.

• Respondent "A" stated, "I can't apply this in my work." It turned out the issue with deadlines was not about time management but expertise management.
• As for Respondent "B," they commented: "Everything is fine, the info is necessary, but there's nothing super new or useful for me yet, and I'm glad that's the case. Time management is something I mastered under extreme conditions that I deliberately put myself in when I was a PM and wanted to level up as a specialist. They even set up a third monitor for me in the office at my request so I could manage even more tasks simultaneously. Later, I read books on time management by very serious Western businessmen, watched lectures, and listened to podcasts. It would be uncomfortable if I suddenly realized that all of this wasn't enough to build the most efficient work system for myself and that only on this course did I learn something incredibly important." In other words, the low rating was not due to the course itself but the high expertise of the specialist.

Incidentally, the author of the second comment later sent almost their entire team to the training.

Mistake #4 — You Can't Please Everyone

"I won't attend classes anymore, better to spend this time on work tasks," we heard from one of the training participants. "Attend you must, decline you may not." Where would you put the comma?

We then agreed with the employee's supervisor that they could skip the training, as the work goals and training content weren't connected. We decided not to force participation and offered the space to a new participant.

Mistake #5 — More Chats for the Chat God!

How to organize communication if the trainer and group are on different messengers?

Initially, we agreed that communication would be structured as follows:

• the chat between the trainer and HR goes on Telegram;
• the chat between HR and participants—on the corporate messenger.

At some point, this led to complications in working on assignments. HR was unavailable for a few days. Participants found it inconvenient to ask clarifying questions directly to the trainer. As a result, many didn’t complete the assignments.

We drew an important conclusion: for the next training, we added the trainer to our corporate messenger and created a group chat with participants.

Mistake #6 — Gathering Feedback on the Training After It’s Over

Usually, few are willing to fill out forms after a training, with only 40–60% of participants completing them at most. We wanted feedback from all participants. Thanks to our trainer, we conducted an additional engaging session to summarize and collect feedback.

***

The time management training effectively addressed three main tasks for us:

1. Learn new and refresh existing time management tools.
2. Learn how to replenish energy levels promptly, staying effective and active both at work and outside of it.
3. Exchange life hacks with colleagues, discovering what others use and sharing our own, offering the added bonus of team-building.