The real cost of employee training: Skills gaps and inefficient learning platforms

Tech skills gaps may be costing your organization more than you think. In fact, 61% of tech executives say they’ve lost $250,000 or more in the past year alone. 69% of organizations have also abandoned projects due to a lack of tech skills. 

Add an ineffective learning platform on top of that, and skills gaps aren’t the only thing costing you. You’re also investing in learning resources that won’t help your teams learn new skills.

Mitigating these costs starts by finding the right learning partner. Learn how much skills gaps and employee training are really costing you and why it may be time to switch to Pluralsight to deliver lasting ROI with learning investments.

Even if you’ve invested in employee training, inefficient learning platforms and stagnant upskilling strategies can continue to hold you back. 

After all, tech skills change or become obsolete after just two years. Teams that rely on the status quo or one-and-done employee training will find themselves falling further behind—and racking up additional skills gap-related charges—as tech changes.

When your organization is working on critical initiatives spanning cloud, cybersecurity, and AI, your employees are being pulled in a hundred different directions. This typically results in two employee training scenarios. Employees either become overwhelmed and don’t learn anything, or they don’t know what to prioritize and end up learning new skills they can’t apply to their current projects.

When learning platforms lack clear learning paths or fail to surface course recommendations tailored to an employee’s role or skills gaps, it’s even harder for learners to zero in on what they need. 

The result? Abandoned projects and budget overruns. Cloud, cybersecurity, and AI/ML projects in particular are most likely to be abandoned due to tech skills gaps. 84% of organizations also say skills gaps cause tech projects to go over budget at least some of the time.

When you’re investing millions of dollars in AI and other technologies, you need those projects to succeed—without incurring additional costs on top of your initial investments.

No matter how strong your defenses are or how robust your incident response plan is, employees need more than theory to prevent incidents and confidently navigate cyber attacks. 

Hands-on opportunities allow them to practice new skills and build cybersecurity readiness. When they lack these learning experiences, they’re more likely to make mistakes.

95% of cybersecurity issues can already be traced to human error, not software flaws. Don’t risk that number growing with insufficient or outdated cybersecurity skills—especially when the cost of downtime is $300,000 per hour on average, not including reputational or regulatory damage.

76% of large enterprises spend more than $5 million per month on cloud services. But thanks to increasing complexity, decentralized ownership, and AI use, nearly one-third (29%) of cloud investment is wasted. 

This challenge compounds with increased AI use. Teams need cloud knowledge to use AI efficiently and vice versa. Upskilling that focuses on a single domain doesn’t properly prepare teams for the cross-functional reality of today’s projects, leading to overprovisioning, inefficient workloads, and other unnecessary cloud costs.

Even trying to fill the skills gap can be costly—especially if new hires don’t last. According to SHRM, the average cost-per-hire is $5,475 for non-executive employees and $35,879 for executives.

Failing to find the right candidates can also impact your organization’s ability to deliver future projects. 91% of tech executives and 87% of L&D leaders are concerned they don’t have enough junior tech professionals in the pipeline to cover future skills gaps. 

These mistakes aren’t irreversible, though. If organizations assess new hires’ skills, they can create tailored onboarding programs to target their weaknesses and get them production ready faster. The right learning can help you identify existing employees for open positions and develop entry-level talent for more senior roles.

The vast majority of organizations have already invested in learning platforms to close skills gaps and reduce costs. The problem is that access to a traditional learning platform isn’t enough. 

Content libraries with fluctuating quality, passive learning, and basic analytics don’t engage employees or give you the insights you need to turn upskilling from a cost center to an ROI driver. You end up paying for inefficiency. 

Pluralsight, on the other hand, is a true learning partner that empowers you to build and validate workforce capabilities. Here’s how we’re different.

With most learning platforms, you pay for a set number of licenses whether or not you actually use them. But when 15% of organizations say employees aren’t engaged with learning programs, a significant portion of that investment is wasted. 

Instead of paying for inactive users and juggling seats across teams, Pluralsight allows you to give everyone access to learning and pay only for the people who use it. It’s a win-win strategy. You don’t have to manage licenses, and employees learn new skills exactly when they need to.

WEX is proof that giving more employees access to learning can have a real impact on business goals. Initially, WEX split its learning stack between two providers, with just 300 Pluralsight licenses.

When priorities shifted to AI, they needed developers with hands-on experience and moved their entire tech organization to Pluralsight. Scaling from 300 to 1,500 users, they hit 70%+ annual tech team engagement, ahead of their 60% benchmark, and providing a risk-free environment for developers to experiment without constraints.

Crowd-sourced content libraries have no shortage of content, but the quality of their courses can vary. That isn’t a problem with Pluralsight. With a 5.5% author acceptance rate, every course on the platform is created by a vetted expert with an average of 10+ years of experience.

Access to curated, up-to-date learning content allows learners to apply new skills immediately and accelerate delivery. At Equans, more than 90% of learners report saving up to 10% of their time thanks to streamlined processes learned with Pluralsight.

77% of tech executives have seen employees complete training or earn certifications and still not be able to use those skills in their day-to-day work. That’s why learners need hands-on experience with new skills in practice environments. 

Recognized as a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Technology Skills Development Platforms, Q2 2025, Pluralsight was the only vendor to receive the highest possible score in the hands-on learning criterion. Our hands-on labs and sandboxes allow teams to test their skills, ideate, and make mistakes in real-world practice scenarios so they aren’t jumping right into your live environments.

They can also help reduce costs. Thanks to enhanced technology skill development, TeamHealth delivered new automated billing and saw a potential of $5 million in savings annually.

Most learning platforms surface participation and completion metrics like hours watched, assessments completed, or certifications earned to measure upskilling success. And while those metrics are helpful, they fail to show learning’s full impact on business outcomes and ROI. What’s more, tech executives (90%) and L&D leaders (84%) worry this type of skill measurement can be gamed.

Pluralsight analytics provide completion metrics and give you insight into your team’s strengths and weaknesses to refine your upskilling strategy. Pluralsight AI MCP also allows you to conduct ROI analysis directly in your AI tools.* By securely connecting your GitLab commits, Jira ticket history, and other business data with Pluralsight content and skill analytics, you can easily see learning’s impact on tickets, engineering output, and business outcomes.

Here are just a few examples. With Pluralsight, Morgan Stanley achieved a 46% increase in upskilling efficiency and a 56% increase in skill proficiency. This impacted their in-flight projects, with a resulting 30% improvement in code quality.

Sage reduced time to address vulnerabilities by 100% year-over-year and cut issues per line of code by 90%. And one global SaaS company cut resolution time by 30% across its SRE teams.

Between abandoned projects, cybersecurity risks, and more, skills gaps are already costing your organization. If you stay with a learning provider that doesn’t help you close those gaps, inefficient technology becomes yet another line item on your expense sheet.

Avoid the extra charges and switch to Pluralsight. Our technology learning platform enables organizations to build and validate the capabilities you need to execute your most important business priorities. 

Learn how Pluralsight stacks up against Coursera and Udemy.

*Patent pending. All trademarks and other marks are owned by Pluralsight, LLC.