No, L&D doesn’t want a Netflix for learning experience

I mean, that’s the blog post in the title right there.

If you’re an L&D vendor and your marketing or product development is to build a Netflix for learning platform, we need to have words.

The fundamental problem with this kind of thinking is a complete misunderstanding of how people at work solve their learning needs.

It’s taking consumer behaviour, and putting the wrong kind of thinking against learning at work needs.

In our personal usage, we can negotiate with ourselves in the way we use our time. If we choose to binge watch a series over a weekend, we have the autonomy to make that choice, so we do. Importantly, and this is important, we’re often not watching the series to learn something in order to improve performance. Unless endurance watching of shows becomes a job, that is.

In work, we do not have that autonomy.

I might find a TED talk particularly captive, and it gives me a powerful bit of thinking for the 18 mins I watched it for.

But, and this is an important use of the conjunction, I cannot continue to watch a series of videos that lasts hours.

There is actual work to be done.

In most cases, the series of videos will not be performance enhancing because they are not designed for that.

More importantly, though, we are already processing a lot of information. We cannot binge a series of learning videos and process that much information in a useful way to improve performance. To do so would require an incredible level of mental processing power, which we’re already mentally sharing across many other things happening at that moment and during the day.

Watching one video - even if it’s a 2 min micro learning piece - still means we have to do something with that information if we want it to improve performance. This is where a lot of Learning Experience Platforms are lacking in their learning design. They’re built for consumption, not for learning.

For impact - for actual impact - the videos / modules / courses need to have other things for learners to engage with. That might be a piece of reflective practise. It might be a bot using coaching programming to have a chat with the learner about their learning and potential actions. It might be an email sent to the line manager informing them that content was completed and they need to have a coaching conversation. It might be a link to an internal blogging platform or social learning platform like Slack or Teams where they have to post their learnings and commitments.

To be clear, this isn’t a comment on or critique of the content side of stuff. The content side of stuff is very well designed and very well produced. The instructional design, the creative, the content production, the art direction is all top quality stuff. What is vitally missing is the lived experience of how L&D will use an LXP to solve performance problems.

So let me end by restating the problem. The problem is not that an LXP isn’t a valuable tool for learning solutions. The problem is that the LXP is an incomplete solution and fundamentally misunderstands the problems people are trying to solve at work.