Where Learning Actually Happens (And It’s Not in Training Rooms)

After years of training across ships and island resorts, I’ve realised something simple:

Most learning doesn’t happen when we plan it.

It happens when the job forces it.

I’ve seen waiters freeze during peak service even after perfect classroom scores. What helped them wasn’t a refresher. It was a supervisor’s one-line correction delivered in the heat of the moment.

Those micro-lessons stick differently.

During a Phase 2 pre-opening at an Indian Ocean resort, our villa team kept missing small setup details. Instead of calling them back to class, we trained inside the work itself. Live resets. Real deadlines. Zero buffers.

Their consistency improved in days.

And at a luxury beach resort in Kerala, one of the sharpest lessons happened by chance.

A new steward kept misplacing items during turndown. His supervisor didn’t redo the module. She walked the villa with him once during actual service, narrating her thought process.

He never repeated the mistake again.

That one walkthrough beat every checklist.

So where does real learning actually happen?

Inside the moment.

Inside the pressure.

Inside the work itself.

People learn faster when the lesson meets them exactly where they stand.

Not after. Not later. Not in theory.

As L&D professionals, our role is no longer to design bigger programs.

It’s to remove friction so learning can happen right now.

Because when learning becomes part of the work—not separate from it—teams shift.

They stop waiting to be trained.

They start improving every day.

That’s where real capability is built.

Not in the classroom.

In the current.

#LearningAndDevelopment #LeadershipDevelopment #HospitalityIndustry #CruiseLife #TrainingCulture #OnTheJobLearning #ServiceExcellence #kketanwaghmare