The problem with learning objectives nobody talks about
I have written hundreds of learning objectives — neat, numbered, professionally worded, slide two of every deck — and spent years writing them without asking the question that should have come first: who is this actually for? Not the participant, despite the phrasing. The L&D team reads them. The programme manager reads them. The participant reads them at the start of day one and forgets them by the first coffee break.
That inversion is where the problem starts. Write for an audience that isn't the person doing the learning, and the objective stops being a commitment and starts being a communication artefact — something that signals the programme was designed thoughtfully, without ever needing to be true. That's why the same verbs appear across almost every technical training programme ever written: understand, appreciate, be familiar with, demonstrate awareness of. Robert Mager identified the mechanism in 1962 and called these covert behaviours — states that can only be inferred, never directly observed. He wasn't against them for being vague. He was against them for being untestable.
| The verb | Why it gets chosen | The honest version |
| Understand | Covers surface recall to deep application. Impossible to disprove. | Configure / diagnose / explain without reference, under timed conditions |
| Appreciate | Implies value communicated. Requires nothing beyond passive reception. | Recommend an approach, with documented rationale, against competing requirements |
| Be familiar with | The lowest bar in the vocabulary. Satisfied by a single mention on a slide. | Locate, retrieve, and apply — without being directed to the feature first |
| Configure | Observable. Testable. Either the system works or it doesn't. | This is what production-ready looks like. Write this one. |
Run any programme's objectives through that table and count how many land in the safe-verb rows. In most programmes the ratio is roughly four to one — four unverifiable claims for every one that says anything real about what participants will be able to do. That ratio isn't accidental. It reflects a system rewarding the appearance of accountability without the substance of it.
Sometimes the verb is chosen because the design genuinely can't deliver anything stronger. A programme built on demonstrations and guided walkthroughs can't honestly claim "participants will configure independently" — so it claims "participants will understand the configuration process" instead, because understanding is unverifiable and anything done in the room technically counts. The verb is weak because the programme is weak. The verb just hides it. That gap, between what the objective promises and what the hardest exercise in the programme actually demands, is invisible precisely because the objective was written to reassure, not to be tested.
An objective written in falsifiable language does something a covert-behaviour objective cannot: it functions as a design constraint. Write "participants will configure a multi-tier pricing structure in an unsupported environment, within 45 minutes, without reference materials," and you've made a promise the programme now has to keep — the assessment has to test that exact thing, the scaffolding has to prepare for unsupported performance, not guided replication. When I rewrote the objectives for the advanced curriculum at Apttus, the redesign that followed wasn't optional: the objective said "evaluate and recommend," the existing programme reached "apply with guidance," and the only way to close a two-level gap was to redesign the exercises, the assessment, and the facilitator's role. The honest objective forced the honest design — that, more than any single content choice, is why the IBM Americas results eventually looked the way they did.
Write the objective you'd be prepared to be held to. If you wouldn't put your name on it in front of the participant's manager six months after training ends, it isn't an objective. It's a cover story.
Further reading: Mager (1962). Preparing Instructional Objectives. Fearon. · Wiggins & McTighe (2005). Understanding by Design. ASCD. · Dick, Carey & Carey (2014). The Systematic Design of Instruction. Pearson.