Speed. It’s the pulse of modern business; the difference between staying ahead and becoming irrelevant. But in the pursuit of speed, most forget that learning isn’t a race against time. It’s a craft, one that demands discipline, design, and deliberate mastery.
That’s where Dr Raman K. Attri steps in, a globally recognized thought leader and Executive Coach to Chief Learning Officers who has made it his mission to decode the science of speed in professional growth. The man behind the GetThereFaster™ movement, Dr. Attri bridges research, experience, and behavioral insight to help leaders accelerate not just their learning but their results. With over three decades of experience spanning science, engineering, and leadership, he’s known for transforming how organizations approach training, from mere knowledge transfer to measurable performance impact.
What makes Dr. Attri’s philosophy compelling is his unapologetic focus on mastery, on turning every learning curve into a performance breakthrough. For him, the speed at which professionals develop themselves and their teams isn’t just an advantage; it’s a competitive weapon.
Intrigued by his journey and the powerful ideas driving his work, we sat down with Dr. Raman K. Attri to explore how he’s helping leaders and organizations truly get there faster.
Here are the excerpts from the interview:
Dr. Raman, you’ve spent over three decades shaping the way organizations accelerate learning. What originally drew you into the world of training and learning transformation?
My entry into the world of training wasn’t accidental—it was born out of necessity and personal struggle. Contracting polio at six months left me permanently disabled, unable to walk like other children. Growing up, I constantly feared being left behind, not just physically but in every aspect of life. That fear became a driving force, pushing me to “walk faster” in other domains. Learning became my salvation. I immersed myself in books, often teaching myself subjects well ahead of my age, and soon became a go-to “teacher” for my classmates.
Later, as an engineer and technology scientist, I realized that technical brilliance alone wasn’t enough—organizations struggled with how fast their people could learn and perform. When I was deployed into the training arm of my organization, I discovered my true calling. I saw first-hand how the ability to shorten time to proficiency could make or break not just careers, but entire businesses. That was over 30 years ago, and since then, my mission has remained consistent: to make learning easier, faster, and more impactful for people and organizations alike.
Your motto is “The speed at which your workforce learns determines your competitive advantage.” Can you share the story behind how this became your guiding principle?
The motto crystallized from both personal life and professional research. Personally, my disability forced me to view speed differently. While I couldn’t walk fast, I taught myself to “learn fast.” That skill became my competitive edge. Professionally, decades of research with world-class organizations confirmed the same truth: competitive advantage no longer comes from resources or talent alone—it comes from how fast you can make your people proficient.
For example, I studied industries like semiconductors and telecom where the shelf life of a skill had dropped to just months, while mastery often took years. This mismatch created a catch-22: companies needed employees to innovate every three months, but it took two to three years to get them to mastery. Those who figured out ways to shorten time-to-proficiency survived; those who didn’t lost market share.
That’s when I coined the phrase in my book “Speed Matters”. It wasn’t just a slogan—it was a call to leaders to rethink what they measure. Stop chasing efficiency alone; start prioritizing learning speed. Because ultimately, the rate of your workforce’s learning defines the rate of your business growth.
Having pioneered methodologies that cut workforce time-to-proficiency by 50%, what would you say is the single biggest mindset shift organizations need to make to truly embrace accelerated learning?
The biggest mindset shift is realizing that speed is not about doing things faster; it’s about enabling people to reach mastery faster. Many leaders confuse speed with urgency—pushing teams to deliver quickly, setting aggressive deadlines, or cramming content-heavy training into shorter schedules. That’s not true speed; that’s a “mad rush” that leads to burnout and shallow learning.
Real speed is about creating conditions where employees can deliver first-time-right outcomes consistently. That requires designing ecosystems—not just training programs—that combine performance support tools, coaching, on-demand learning, and workplace immersion. In my research with 85 global leaders, the most successful ones shifted their focus from training hours to the amount of time-to-proficiency they were able to cut. They stopped asking, “How much content can we deliver?” They also stopped asking “What is the ROI of the training?”. Rather they started asking, “How quickly can an employee reach confident, competent performance?”
It’s a subtle but profound mindset change: from valuing knowledge accumulation to valuing performance acceleration.
Scenario-based learning and immersive design have become buzzwords—but how do you ensure these aren’t just trends, but actually measurable performance drivers in the long run?
In my most recent book “Training for Unknowns”, I have outlined the power of scenario-based learning. Scenario-based learning and immersive design are powerful tools—but only if they’re applied with precision. Too often, organizations fall into the trap of using them as flashy add-ons without anchoring them to proficiency metrics.
In my own corporate work designing multimillion-dollar training programs for over 5,000 engineers, we integrated immersive simulations not for their novelty, but for their ability to replicate real-world challenges. We measured success not by completion rates but by how quickly employees could solve complex technical problems on the job.
The long-term test of any approach is whether it reduces time-to-proficiency. When immersive methods help employees achieve first-time-right outcomes faster, you know they’re working. Otherwise, they’re just another trend. My advice to leaders: don’t chase technologies or buzzwords—chase impact. The design must always start from the performance outcome you want to accelerate.
With 30 books to your name, you’ve advanced frameworks that have influenced global practices. If you had to distill one universal truth about corporate training that every leader must understand, what would it be?
Almost all of my books focus on one central idea to downplay the discussion around training and elevate one simple universal truth: training is not about transferring knowledge—it’s about transferring speed. Too many organizations still see training as a one-off event, focused on content delivery. But knowledge alone does not equate to proficiency. In fact, poorly designed training often slows people down because it overwhelms them with information they don’t immediately need.
From my decades of research, the most effective training is that which shortens the journey from novice to proficient performer. That’s why I emphasize “speed metrics” rather than traditional learning or training metrics like hours of training. Leaders must understand that the true purpose of training is to engineer acceleration—helping employees get to consistent, reliable performance in the shortest possible time. If training doesn’t achieve that, it’s not training; it’s just information.
You’ve managed cross-functional teams of 100+ across six countries. What have been the biggest leadership lessons from operating at such a global scale?
Often times, organizations make global leadership appears as a complex set of rules for executive behaviors, cultural sensitivities and perspectives. In my view, we need a simpler anchor that can be applied universally regardless of the regions, languages, cultures or markets to cater to the ever-expanding world.
For instance, my key appeal about “speed” is interpreted differently in different cultures. In certain contexts, executives have misread it as a speed with which they or their teams produce the outcomes, results or deliverables. In my CLO coaching sessions, I teach C-suite leaders to adopt and proliferate a shared vision of “first-time-right-speed.” The first-time-right speed is a kind of pace with which your teams produce the first-time right outcomes, deliverables or results – the ones which do not need rework and the ones which absolutely meet or exceed customer expectations. Even if it takes longer time and at times may appear slow at first, in reality in the long-run it gives you an unmatchable efficiency by avoiding costs and energy on residual issues unlike your competitors. This counter-intuitive concept of going a bit slow gives you an unmatchable first-time-right speed which is central to new leadership thinking required to succeed in highly accelerated business world.
As someone who collaborates with Fortune 500 companies, what’s the most common training blind spot you see in large organizations—and how do you address it?
The biggest blind spot is the over-reliance on training as a magic wand. Many executives assume that sending employees through long training programs will automatically produce proficient performers. In reality, most corporate training mirrors academic classrooms—too much focus on content memorization, too little on performance application.
I’ve seen call centers, for instance, put new agents through 11 weeks of intensive product training, only for them to need another three months before they could actually handle customers smoothly. That’s wasted time and money. In contrast, organizations that use performance support tools—like augmented reality glasses providing step-by-step guidance—cut time-to-proficiency by nearly 50%.
So, my guidance is: stop seeing training as the end. See it as one element in a larger ecosystem of performance acceleration. True competitive advantage lies in reducing the time it takes for employees to deliver value, not in how many hours of training they complete.
Corporate learning often competes with business priorities. How do you convince executives that training is not a cost center, but a growth accelerator?
In my book “Training Impact Measurement,” I have highlighted a unique model how to present the value proposition differently as training leaders. While convincing their executives or upper management, the major mistake most CLOs or L&D leaders tend to make is to emphasize the importance of their training projects by quantifying its impact on rudimentary metrics like learners’ reactions or short-term skill improvements.
In my coaching sessions to some of the world’s renowned Chief Learning Officers and L&D leaders, I often appeal to them: your competitors can copy your products, but they can’t easily copy how fast your people learn. When I show that every month shaved off an engineer’s proficiency timeline can save millions in faster product launches, the conversation shifts. For example, in semiconductors, even a slight delay can result in lost revenue worth hundreds of millions. That’s not about training—it’s about market survival. Once leaders see that speed of learning is directly tied to speed-to-market and customer satisfaction, they no longer see training as optional. They see it as an accelerator of growth and resilience.
So, the key here is to frame learning as a strategic weapon, not an expense by quantify how training provides competitive advantage.
Beyond methodologies and frameworks, what do you consider your proudest accomplishment in shaping workforce learning worldwide?
My proudest accomplishment is not a book or an award—it’s the human impact. I’ve had countless professionals tell me that learning my methods gave them confidence, clarity, and speed they never thought possible. To me, the most fulfilling achievement is knowing that I’ve helped people who once felt stuck—like I did as a disabled child—to find a way to “walk faster” in their careers.
Professionally, I take pride in being the first researcher to conceptualize and formalize the field of “speed to proficiency.” Cracking the code to cut workforce proficiency time by 50% is no small feat, and seeing organizations adopt those principles globally validates decades of persistence. But at the end of the day, it’s the individual stories of transformation—employees, managers, leaders—who tell me they can now achieve excellence faster that keep me going.
Finally, what legacy do you hope to leave behind in the corporate training world, and what advice would you give to future leaders in this space?
I hope my legacy is simple yet powerful: that I helped shift the world’s focus from learning more to learning faster with impact. If future leaders remember me as the person who taught them how to “walk faster” in whatever they do, despite not being able to walk myself, that will be enough.
My advice to future leaders is this: don’t fall in love with tools or trends—fall in love with people’s growth. Build systems that respect human learning, not just business metrics. And above all, remember that speed is not about rushing; it’s about enabling others to reach their best in less time, with less struggle. If you can help your people achieve that, you won’t just be a leader—you’ll be a catalyst for transformation.
