As I’ve noted previously in this newsletter, and as we identified in our 2022 ‘Learner Intelligence Report’, employees perceive lack of time as one of the most significant barriers to workplace learning.
This is backed up by recent survey data from Gallup, showing that 89% of CHROs and 41% of employees view ‘time away from job responsibilities’ as the biggest obstacle to L&D.
A couple of things immediately jump out here:
‘Learning and development’ is generally regarded as synonymous with ‘formal learning’ — something that happens outside the flow of work;
Despite urgent calls for businesses to invest in upskilling, leaders are reluctant to create time for formal L&D that takes employees away from their day jobs.
Putting aside my skepticism that lack of time is really what’s stopping employees from investing in their own development, the status quo might crudely be interpreted as: ‘Employees want more time to learn, business leaders don’t want to give it to them.’
To steel-man the business leaders’ case for a moment, time spent training is time spent not doing. And time really is money.
For the sake of argument, let’s imagine we have a 30-minute e-learning module that’s mandatory for all 10,000 of ACME Corp’s employees.
To calculate the total cost of this module, we need to consider not only the cost of developing or procuring it, but the cost of paying 10,000 staff members to complete it.
Assuming all 10,000 of ACME Corp’s employees receive an average salary of £800/week for a 40-hour work week, then the cost of having every member of staff spend 30 minutes on that e-learning module is roughly £100,000.
Now, maybe that’s a price worth paying when weighed against the potential costs of failing to comply with whatever laws or regulations the module was designed to address. But either way, it’s not nothing.
While the positions of business leaders and employees may appear to be at odds when it comes to time spent on formal learning, my hunch is that both groups are fundamentally asking the same question: ‘What does time spent learning buy me?’.
The answer they’re looking for is ‘improved performance’. The answer they often get is ‘30 minutes of CPD.’
Here on the Mindtools Custom team, our approach is to start by identifying the impact our clients are looking to have, and working backwards from there.
Framed in this way, the client isn’t buying a 30-minute e-learning module, a half-day workshop, or a months-long blended program. What they’re buying is behavior change.
Want help designing custom learning that’s measured in impact, rather than seat time? Then get in touch by emailing custom@mindtools.com or reply to this newsletter from your inbox.
🎧 On the podcast
A couple of weeks ago, L&D Detective Kevin M Yates joined me and Dr Anna on The Mindtools L&D Podcast to talk about isolating the impact of training at work. When listening to this episode, Ross G took umbrage at some of the claims we made. So, last week, we re-litigated! We discussed:
Whether control groups are really worth it. (I still think they are!)
Other ways of measuring learning impact
Why Dr Anna thinks learning NEVER leads (directly) to business impact
Check out the episode below. 👇
You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Spotify or the podcast page of our website.
📖 Deep dive
Last week, our washer/dryer stopped working.
A few years ago, this would have prompted an immediate call to a technician, likely resulting in a hefty bill to resolve an issue a more mechanically-minded person could easily have tackled themself.
But before picking up the phone this time around, I decided to give ChatGPT a whirl.
Quickly diagnosing the problem, my AI sidekick walked me through the steps required to trouble-shoot the appliance, using an image I uploaded to help me locate and unblock the drain pump.
According to new research from Open AI, Duke, and Harvard, this use case would fall into the bucket of ‘Practical Guidance’, which accounts for approximately 24% of ChatGPT queries.
Digging a little deeper, the researchers categorize 36% of ‘Practical Guidance’ use cases as ‘Tutoring or Teaching’.
While a skeptic could reasonably ask how much real ‘learning’ is happening on ChatGPT and other AI platforms, it’s clear millions of people are using these tools in a way that’s designed to enable or augment performance, whether that’s writing a report or unclogging a drain pump.
As this habit becomes more deeply ingrained, L&D will be faced with a deeper version of the challenge presented by the rise of Google search: persuading learners that what’s available internally is more relevant, more effective, or more trustworthy than the consumer tools they use every day.
Chatterji, A., Cunningham, T., Deming, D., Hitzig, Z., Ong, C., Shan, C., & Wadman, K. (2025). ‘How people use ChatGPT’.
👹 Missing links
📽️ Which multimedia strategies actually improve learning?
If you’ve worked in L&D for any length of time, you’ve likely come across Richard Mayer’s ‘principles of multimedia learng’. Hugely influential in education and instructional design, Mayer’s theory - and the principles resulting from that theory - explains how people learn more effectively from words and imagery together than from words alone. But do all of the principles actually work? In this edition of the The Learning Dispatch (good title 😉) Carl Hendrick unpacks a recent meta-analysis that seeks to answer that question.
😱 Eliezer Yudkowsky on AI doom
Eliezer Yukowsky, founder of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) and one of the most influential voices in AI, published a new book last week: If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. In an interview on the Hard Fork podcast, Eliezer lays out the case against Silicon Valley’s rush to develop super-intelligent AI, and why he believes it poses an existential threat to humanity. Not exactly bedtime listening, but interesting nonetheless.
🙅♂️ The dangers of accepting what you see online
Our pal Ross Stevenson is tired of seeing so many research papers taken out of context, and turned into clickbaity headlines. Specifically, research papers about the impact of AI. Instead of accepting these headlines at face value, Ross suggests we should be ‘skeptical hippos’, going to the source to check the paper’s stated methodology and limitations.
👋 And finally…
A message from ‘Foo Fighters’:
👍 Thanks!
Thanks for reading The L&D Dispatch from Mind Tools! If you’d like to speak to us, work with us, or make a suggestion, you can email custom@mindtools.com.
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