#eLAPC ?? | Ep. 33 | #SundayRant | The Biggest Mistake L&D Ever Made

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Enhanced Transcript

Welcome to this edition of the Sunday rant on The eLearning Alchemist Podcast. Today, I’m going to share an opinion… If you’ve listened to any of the other episodes, particularly these rants, that doesn’t surprise you. But, this one, could be easily argued for a number of reasons. So, I’d like to make my case for: The biggest mistake L&D has ever made.

On a recent LinkedIn post, Adam Morgan, a voice actor from Australia, recalled attending an eLearning conference years back that had a tagline like: “Faster, Better, Cheaper.” And, while we can certainly pick a part each of those words, let’s focus on the last one: “Cheaper.”

It’s my contention that the biggest mistake Learning & Development ever made was: pitching eLearning as a cheaper alternative to instructor-led training. To be fair, it’s completely understandable why we did this. There was - and in many cases still is - resistance to eLearning. There was a new cost associated with it and there were - and are - no shortage of skeptics regarding its efficacy. So, we instinctively picked the low-hanging, and easily quantifiable fruit. 

eLearning ushered in an era of reduced travel and meal costs. It also meant we’d see a reduction in infrastructure costs and could reclaim the training room for storage. We’d no longer needed to print large manuals and handouts. Perhaps most importantly, we’d reduce salary costs by keeping people on the job, while regaining the opportunity costs we were losing by having them away from it.  And, although we probably didn’t mention it, more than one business leader was seen licking their lips at the idea of reducing their trainer head-count by one or two. 

Yep. We sold eLearning to organizations as a cost savings measure. What a stupid idea. While it helped us get eLearning in the door, it hasn’t lead to greater acceptance of the work we do. Instead, it’s lead to the belief that eLearning is a viable option to fix performance problems cheaply and easily. But, as any eLearning developer will tell you, developing high-quality eLearning, that is, the type of eLearning that transfers knowledge, builds skills, and influences behaviours is anything by cheap and easy. Unfortunately, now that our stakeholders have a taste for cheap, that’s what they want. And the more cheap low quality eLearning we build, the more our customers believe it should be done cheaply and the less anyone believes it can be done well. It’s a downward spiral we’ve been perpetually challenged to escape… and the consequences have been real.

If you’ve ever tried and failed to get another Storyline or Captivate license, you know what I’m talking about. When you get push back on a software license that costs almost nothing by most business standards, we’ve done something terribly wrong.

When we pitched eLearning as the cheaper alternative, we essentially told our customers - the businesses we serve that what we do isn’t valuable enough to justify the cost, so we should reduce the cost by any means necessary, regardless of how it impacts quality. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand that this message isn’t the type that builds your credibility as a department.

In hindsight, it’s easy to judge, those who were leading learning teams when eLearning began to proliferate probably couldn’t foresee the consequences of this messaging. They could of course see the potential of the technology and were probably frustrated as all hell that they couldn’t get buy-in more easily. Even today we struggle to get budget increases as a department. But, that in itself is an important message: If we aren’t able to get the budgets we seek, are we asking for too much, or are we providing too little. 

There may be a bit of the former, but there’s a lot of the latter. We don’t get more budget, because we don’t produce more results, and THAT should have been, and still should be, the pitch for eLearning. We should have asked and must still ask: How can eLearning be used to improve business performance? Instead of trying to producing more, more quickly, which inevitably leads to poor quality and invisible results, we need to slow down, look at how we use eLearning, and ask ourselves how it can be used more effectively. 

We can’t get out of this trap unless we do something differently. Our employees hate eLearning and our business leaders don’t believe it’s worth very much. But, who can blame them? Our current method of next, next, next, multiple choice question is pathetic. Yeah, I said it. And, I build eLearning for a living. 

We made a mistake by pitching eLearning as a cost conscious approach to training and we’re still paying for that mistake decades later. 

That’s the end of the rant. Jump into the description, click the link, and leave your thoughts on this podcast.

Clint Clarkson, CTDP is just another victim who accidentally stumbled down the rabbit hole of corporate learning and development. He is the Founder & Managing Partner of eLearning Alchemy, a custom eLearning development firm. While he’s known for being upbeat, positive, and enthusiastic, Clint is still easily offended by comic-sans, bullet points, and the excessive use of buzzwords. Connect with Clint on LinkedIn or follow him on Twitter.