The Acacia Company, an IT consulting firm, felt that offering an e-learning professional development library of thousands of courses to all employees would help employees develop careers with the company.  After six months the number of employees taking advantage of the free training was less than 25%.  Using business analysis, cause mapping, gap analysis, and job task analysis needs assessment tools, the performance issue was examined.  Root causes uncovered are likely to affect many for-profit publicly-traded companies in the balance of revenue generation and investments in employee development.

 Three primary causes were found to contribute to the reason why employees did not access the e-learning professional development (access, knowledge of the program, and incentive to spend personal time). During the analyses conducted on the performance issue, only the job task analysis pointed to a clear training intervention. The cause map and gap analysis indicated non-training interventions.