I Hate eLearning

In today’s world many businesses have learned that continually providing education opportunities for their employee’s – especial firms that provide in knowledge based services – to grow brings many advantages to the company. For instance providing Harvard Management materials allow employees to go out and learn some of the most up to date techniques to improve their workgroup, department, or whatever organizational group they belong. Sending employee’s to industry seminars helps to bring new ideas into the firm. Having people take classes on a product, system, or industry related certifications helps to improve the productivity of employees. In fact most forms of education that are related to the business create returns to the business beyond the cost of providing the training.

There is at least one huge exception to this though. While not a wide spread problem these programs are not uncommon. I have run into them at two of my employers. The biggest waste of time, waste of education money, simply the big waste are eLearnings (the new version of CBT or computer based training) who’s sole purpose is to train employees on matters of policy. I’m talking about web or computer based programming that go over the latest rules based on C-Level knee jerk reactions to the latest corporate scandals covered by CNN. The point of these programs is not to help the employee do their job, it is not to help educate the employee about important policies that help the firm operate, it is not to help improve productivity, or keep employees up to date on the latest and greatest of industry methods. No the sole purpose of these huge waste of corporate resources is to limit the companies liability in case of a scandal. In essence the company wants to create a device so they can say “we told them so” and get out of responsibility.

My current employer is a very, very, very conservative firm. Always has been for more than a hundred years. So they actually plan to have at least one mandatory training a year that focuses on such issues. These are painful. I can not even explain it. Last year thanks to all the corporate criminal cases going through the courts we had a two part Ethics Training. Wow, it included discussion groups, business cases, and a series of simulations. It was incredibly long. You can’t skip chapters because there are exams at the end of each chapter so you have to do every activity. It lasted close to 3 hours per 1/2. This year because so many companies have lost their client’s personal data we got a training to explain a new – and overly complicated – data protect policy for client personal data. It included a new set of terms that were awkward to use and not really applicable to my job. Again it took about 3 hours and had the end of chapter exams.

Even skimming the material and running through the activities at a break-neck half hazard speed it took an entire night of my free time after working for the day. I have yet to determine what, if any, value the company has gained from me spending almost an entire day participating in the project. It was a complete waste of time really. I suppose next year I will get another one and it will be the bane of my working experience. Of course if that is the worst thing I have to contend with – it isn’t but if it were – I think I will be ok.