The Dos, Don’ts & Myths of Learning Content for Effective Development Programs

Good learning content is essential for any effective learning and development (L&D) strategy, whether it’s for eLearning courses or formal in-person training. The problem is that making impactful learning content for employee development is easy to get wrong, with so many differing ideas about how to do it.

In this guide, we’ll dive into the dos, don’ts, and myths about creating effective learning content for development programs, so you don’t have to get lost in the sauce again.

What is learning content?

Learning content refers to the materials, resources, and tool used to deliver knowledge, information, and skills to learners. It’s a broad term covering everything from traditional textbooks and formal courses to digital resources and online learning. In L&D, learning content is used to facilitate employee training and development and is crucial to transforming how your employees work and think in order to meet organizational goals.

The myths of eLearning content

With everyone jumping on the eLearning bandwagon in some shape or form, it’s no wonder that eLearning content development comes with its fair share of myths and misinformation. We can definitively dispel the three biggest ones:

1. It’s better to have more content
2. You can just get AI to make content for you
3. Bigger price tag equals bigger gains.

Myth #1: More content is always better

You just can’t engage learners with more, more, more. It doesn’t matter if you give employees 30 chapters of a textbook or a few standalone training videos. Quantity does not equal quality (and when we talk “quality”, we really mean “meaningfulness”). It’s far more impactful to have a smaller selection of relevant, well-curated resources than a vast library of materials that are rarely used or hard to sort through.

Myth #2: AI can replace human content creators

As we’ve already established: No, it can’t. AI can assist in creating content, but it can’t replace human content creators entirely. It can’t provide the nuanced judgment and understanding that’s necessary for eLearning content development. Human oversight and decision-making from professionals such as instructional designers is still essential to ensure the quality and relevance of eLearning courses and materials.

Myth #3: Expensive content is always best

While “you get what you paid for” is generally a good guideline, it’s not law. What your organization considers “quality” will depend entirely on your business priorities and needs. It’s more important to focus on how the content aligns with your desired learning objectives than how expensive it is. In other words: Worry about closing specific high-risk capability gaps and helping learners gain the critical information they need for their jobs.

The dos of good eLearning content

Not all learning content is created equal, and that can cost your business in time, resources, and employee engagement and retention. The three big “Do’s” of engaging content are:

1. Invest in quality content
2. Use AI (wisely)
3. Choose a navigable learning management system.

Do invest in quality content

When we talk about “quality” content, we mean content that is relevant, engaging, and effective at achieving learning outcomes.

We ran a study on the state of L&D and performance management in organizations and found that not many L&D initiatives actually achieve learning outcomes. While 94.9% of employees agree that mastering their role-based capabilities is important (capabilities being the mix of knowledge, skills, behaviors, processes, and tools that drive organizational outcomes), only 9.3% go on to complete training and change their behaviors accordingly. As long as this intention-behavior gap exists, employee and business performance can never improve.

The likely culprit is learning that isn’t relevant to employees. In other words, training that doesn’t track towards organizational objectives, align with employees’ day-to-day jobs, or target employees’ specific training needs. Employees care about learning that actually has a “point” (i.e. it reflects real-life scenarios). If it has no point, they won’t waste their time doing it, simple as that. Provide a relevant eLearning course though, and:

• Employees are more likely to stay with their company because it’s providing them with professional development (and that reduces recruitment and onboarding costs).
• Course content is more likely to make learning stick, reducing employee time-to-proficiency and increasing productivity.
• Long-term costs are reduced because training content is aligned with organizational priorities, so your existing content inventory doesn’t need to be updated as often.

Do use AI wisely

Everyone and their dog is talking about utilizing AI to enhance their L&D content. We don’t disagree on this, but we’d caution you about where you use AI.

A lot of people will espouse the importance of using generative AI to easily create training videos, video content, and written content en masse. But remember that intention-behavior gap? Giving learners too many concepts at once actively disengages them and just… doesn’t add to the learning experience. You also can’t trust that AI will create content that is a) accurate and b) relevant to your learners’ needs.

You’re better off using AI to personalize the learning experience by:

• Ensuring training courses are mapped to role-based (and organizational) capabilities
• Tailoring what learning content is assigned to each learner based on their development needs.
• Assessing baseline capability and using that to create learning criteria
• Connecting learning and performance so that both issues are fully integrated.

Do choose an organized LMS

One of the biggest issues with using spreadsheets for L&D and performance management is that it’s just not navigable or centralized. That’s why learning content is at its best when it’s managed by your software learning solutions, rather than manually by individuals—because it makes it easier to find relevant learning materials quickly.

Use some kind of learning management software such as a performance learning management system (PLMS) to organize learning content, capabilities, and performance management activities.

Ideally, your software will have advanced search features and tagging so that supervisors, managers, and learners can find and access relevant content as the need arises, rather than scrolling through a catalog (even if the catalog isn’t bloated). After all, there’s no point in having good learning content if you can’t actually find it. Regularly review if content actively feeds into capability-building and strategy and “prune” outdated or redundant content to keep the library manageable and relevant.

The don’ts of eLearning content

Now let’s look at what not to do with eLearning content development. Don’t:

1. Rely solely on AI
2. Overlook development costs
3. Overload the library.

Don’t rely solely on AI

Again, just because the masses are saying it doesn’t mean you need to follow it. AI can produce large volumes of content, but it’s not always the most accurate or relevant. In a 2024 survey by McKinsey & Company, 63% of organizations named inaccuracy as their biggest concern with generative AI. And a quarter of companies faced negative consequences because of generative AI’s inaccuracy.

We’ve all seen AI struggle to do simple things like unscramble letters into real words. But if you’re using AI to create materials for, let’s say, medical and health fields and the content is wrong, that content is putting people at risk. AI still isn’t ready to make content or decisions without human oversight—you still need to review AI-generated content to make sure it’s accurate and matches your organization’s brand and standards. (Side note: This is why we prefer AI as an assistant to HR in matching content to capabilities to job roles, rather than content creation.)

Don’t overlook development costs

Nothing comes for free these days, and learning content is included in that. Purchasing high-quality learning can add up, especially if you’re trying to populate a whole content library. Content costs could also include a learning management system (LMS) of some kind. Just remember that not all LMSs have a content authoring tool or ready-built content library, meaning you’ll have to rely on learning integrations from third parties or make your own from scratch. And even if you decide to develop content yourself, you still need to pay for the labor and research that goes into that.

Learning content can easily fall flat if there’s no planned budget to properly invest in its quality. There’s a lot of impactful content out there, but if you can’t pay to have it then you’re not going to get it, so make sure you keep that in mind when you’re planning your L&D strategy.

Don’t overload your content library

Less is more, and the same applies to learning. There’s a limit to how much content is actually useful and meaningful to have before it all starts to become derivative. Too much content means there’s a higher chance that content is:

• Outdated (seriously, delete what you no longer need and you’ll be thankful for it)
• Irrelevant to individual or business capabilities (meaning they aren’t impactful)
• Going to overwhelm employees and make the intention-behavior gap wider.

The second you let a content library get to this point, the positive impact from L&D is lost. So keep regular audits of your learning library in mind. A carefully curated list of targeted content is always better to guide learners towards higher learning impact. ??

Key takeaways

It’s easy to get pulled in by the myths surrounding building effective learning content. The best advice we can give is to focus on your own needs. Good learning content is only effective if it answers your development needs and business objectives. If it doesn’t, you just have content for content’s sake, and it’s not actually effective.