Digital training often fails due to lack of attention, lack of technology. AI won’t change anything without new formats. Make way for microlearning: short, mobile, useful and truly engaging.
Professional training: the illusion of digital
Or the art of confusing content and learning
By Samantha Larsen Mellor
Specialist in knowledge transfer and brand storytelling
The LMS, this digital cemetery that no one opens! Less than 15% of modules e-learning are completed. And the sector continues to produce them, and more expensively. The figure has been circulating for years in studies by Brandon Hall Group and the Cegos Observatory. It is cited in conferences, included in white papers, and then… nothing. We continue to produce forty-minute courses. And more expensive, sometimes.
E-learning modules are like a museum that no one visits. Budgets pile up, content sleeps. In certain companies, the rate of opening of compulsory modules, cybersecurity including, peaks below 8%. We call it skills development. Maybe we should call it something else.
400 billion for AI, and always the same errors
Analysts announce nearly $400 billion in investment in AI in 2026, according to Goldman projections Sachs and IDC. A significant portion will go into HR platforms, educational co-pilots and adaptive modules. The promise is beautiful. The risk is known.
Without rethinking the format, these tools will replicate what doesn’t work. An AI that produces a forty-minute module that no one watches is an AI that is more wasteful. Graft from machine learning on an outdated LMS is like motorizing a stagecoach. Historical publishers are now selling their dormant catalog as an AI-ready asset, without changing a comma in the underlying pedagogy.
The real subject is not technology. It’s attention. But attention is gained elsewhere. Employees watch TikTok during the coffee break and release their home module after ninety seconds. The LMS competition is no longer another LMS. It’s Reels, it’s YouTube Shorts is WhatsApp.
Marketing understood this ten years ago. The four-minute pre-roll ad has disappeared, replaced by six-second formats designed for mobile. The training is still defending its one-hour courses. The cultural gap is obvious as soon as we leave the bubble specialized publishers.
Learn as you scroll
Microlearning isn’t just about short videos. It’s a completely different usage logic. We open the app in the metro. We watch forty seconds. We remember one thing, just one thing, but we really remember it. We come back the next day because we wanted to, not because an automatic reminder forced us to.
The training industry has watched this mechanism pass. She didn’t believe it, or she preferred not to believe it.
A few companies have taken the turn. Capsules designed for the telephone, sometimes created by employees themselves, proofread by business experts. The cost of production falls, the commitment triples or quadruples. These numbers exist. They don’t circulate much, because they are disturbing.
But the proof already exists. An analysis carried out over twelve months with three Houses, covering 275 points of sale, shows a clear gap. Teams formed with short, narrative and regular formats recorded nearly five additional points of growth year-on-year.
This result is not due to chance. The new training platform was consulted 11 times more than traditional systems. Knowledge retention has been multiplied by 3. The completion rate grew by 2.5 times. The reason is simple. This content is not experienced as an HR constraint, but as cultural, useful, accessible, almost natural formats in the daily lives of teams.
Change model
The problem lies in the format. As long as we continue to produce long courses, scripted like a lecture, we will finance digital cemeteries under license annual. The billions committed to AI deserve better than a new generation of forgotten LMS. Continuing with a tool incapable of following this logic of use simply prolongs the failure under a new label.
Adopt a platform, designed from the outset for these new formats. This is where the real “Game Changer” lies. L&D departments must think of themselves more like editorial offices than libraries, program an editorial feed, test formats, measure what really grabs attention. The profiles will change accordingly. Fewer traditional educational engineers, more talent from media and content.
The question that decides everything is in one line. Would an employee open this content during lunch, without having to? If the answer is no, the problem is no longer budgetary. It is editorial. And this is where the next decade of corporate learning will play out.
