Boring online training: the contradictions of corporate training 2021

What is the Contradictions of Corporate Training 2021 report?

It's the survey Gamelearn (now Game Strategies) published in February 2021 to put the people who design training face to face with the people who take it. 1,500 HR professionals and employees from organizations in different sectors in Spain, Mexico, the United States and France took part.

The core question was simple: does what HR offers look anything like what employees want? Spoiler: not really. The report also gathered insights from HR leaders on the state of corporate training, plus a chapter on how employees rated the employer brands of large companies in the pharma, finance and tech sectors.

And since presenting findings about boring training in a boring slide deck would have been a bit ironic, the results were unveiled on March 4, 2021 at Learning Wars 2021: an interactive online event built as a video game, with sessions in English, French and Spanish.

Boring online training: 51% of employees say so

2020 pushed everything online in a rush. Over 70% of the HR professionals surveyed said their company had to speed up the move from classroom to digital training. And a similar share planned to increase, or at least maintain, their e-learning investment in 2021.

The catch? More training didn't mean better training. 51% of employees felt their company's online courses were boring and not very interactive.

Why? Just look at the formats that dominated virtual training:

They all have one thing in common: they're one-way. Employees watch or read, but they don't practice, make decisions or get instant feedback. No wonder they tune out.

• Videos: 62%.
• Text documents: 61%.
• Slide presentations, also among the most used.

What employees want (and HR already knows)

When employees were asked which formats they preferred, the answer pointed somewhere else entirely: augmented reality, virtual reality and video games. They want to learn by doing, not by watching.

The twist is that HR agreed. 52% of HR professionals believed simulating real-life situations would make online training more engaging, and 36% pointed to gamification elements. They also admitted their e-learning should be more interactive and include personalized feedback.

That's the big contradiction in the report: in theory, everyone agrees. In practice, PDFs and videos were still running the show.

Why do video games come out on top?

VR and AR are exciting, but in 2021 they were expensive to roll out and hard to scale. The report pointed to a format that combined the best of both worlds: training video games. They were among the formats employees asked for most, and the most cost-effective, thanks to the resources they save and how easily they scale.

No headsets or special hardware required, either: an internet connection is all it takes to access a game-based learning platform with learning paths tailored to each company.

How to use these findings in your training plan

The figures are from 2021, but the lesson still holds. If you want your online training to stop feeling like a chore, start here:

Want to see how things evolved a year later? Take a look at the 2022 edition of the report, which focuses on the score employees give their online training.

• Take stock: how much of your training is video, PDF or slides?
• Add practice: simulations of real situations where mistakes are cheap.
• Give feedback on the spot, not weeks later in a survey.
• Use gamification wisely: challenges, story and progress, not points for the sake of points.
• Ask your people which formats they want, and measure whether they actually engage.