There has been an increased awareness and focus on workplace training in recent years. The rapid growth in digital technology and the globalisation of business and trade is often cited as the reason for this increase because they are seen to impact on business production, policies and communication. As in much educational research, there are questions about how positive workplace learning outcomes can be encouraged. Although attention is generally given to skills improvement, goals are important in workplace training for a number of reasons. They assist the learning process, give direction to a course or programme, help us measure success and give information about stakeholders’ expectations. However, in workplaces, there can be disparate goals. Companies often aim to align workplace training with business objectives. Employees, as learners, may have individual goals, and as part of the context, tutors and government funders may have additional goals. While the four stakeholders in this research are: the government, the company, training staff and learners, the focus is on the companies’ and learners’ goals. It explores learners’ goals for workplace training and how they relate to company goals. In order to investigate this research question, I engaged with five workplace training programmes, used interviews, observations and documentation with a qualitative approach to gather data. I interviewed company managers at the beginning and end of the data collection, and I interviewed tutors and learners at different points in their training programme, I observed a training session when possible and collected relevant training and company documents. Three factors seemed to contribute to positive learner response to workplace training programmes. These three factors were the tutors’ teaching approach, NZQA qualifications offered in the training, and employees increased sense of belonging in the company and being valued in the company. These three factors also contributed to aligning learners goals to the company goals. This study suggests workplace training programmes can be beneficial to both the company and learner/employees and may be useful, therefore, for people involved in implementing training in the workplace.