As I talk with learning executives in my network, there’s a phenomenon that’s occurring across workplaces: a complete, utter lack of interest in corporate learning. It shows up in one or all of these forms: declining enrollment in virtual or in-person learning programs, cancellations and no shows, and listless or unenthusiastic attendance. In person, that looks like people multitasking on their laptops and phones. Virtually, it means most or all attendees are off camera and muted from the start to the end of the learning session.

It’s tempting to blame this disengagement on AI. The thinking goes something like this: employees don’t know what skills are worth investing in, as AI eats away their roles. Or folks are too demoralized by the looming threat to job security that AI poses. Or people are using AI instead of developing the skills they once needed to do unfamiliar scopes of work.

I’m sure AI has contributed to people spurning internal development opportunities. But I saw learning engagement collapsing even before Generative AI was creeping into our workplaces in 2023. I personally witnessed it a few decades ago, and there were factors present then that persist today.

Mapping my own (dis)engagement journey

Fresh out of grad school, I took a government auditing job in Boston. I was what could be charitably called a HUGE NERD, and – even though I was coming out of 18 straight years of formal education – I was still hungry for more learning opportunities.

Imagine my surprise and delight when I found out that my new organization required everyone to receive at least 40 hours of continuing education every year. I couldn’t wait to get started, and I was eager to take a look at the menu of corporate learning options.

For me, that menu took a physical form – an overstuffed folder with a paperclipped “routing slip” that would be plopped into the inbox that sat on the corner of my desk. That folder had flyers from training companies like Fred Pryor, FranklinCovey, and Lorman. It had brochures on professional organizations like the American Society for Public Administration (ASPA) and the International City/County Management Association (ICMA). And there were order forms for books, videos, CDs, and other educational materials. It was a real, enticing smorgasbord of content.

I can barely describe the professional ecstasy with which I pored over these materials when they initially arrived. I picked all sorts of courses on project management, financial analysis, writing strong findings and reports, understanding public-private partnerships, managing procurement systems, constructing megaprojects, building schools, etc. (Recall that I was and am a huge nerd. Huge.)

I called in or mailed (mailed! We had a franking machine in the copy room…) registration forms. Whether online registration for conferences was available at this time is moot; where I worked, only 2 heavily monitored computers were connected to the Internet. Regardless, the lag between registration and attendance only added to my anticipation.

I can still feel the moment of shock and disappointment when I started to realize how rotten the food at the smorgasbord was. I was nestled into a metal chair balancing a notebook and croissant on my lap, waiting for my first chosen lesson to arrive. And that lesson was at least five minutes late.

What happened?

As I juggled my writing materials and breakfast, I remember watching an unprepared facilitator stumble in and bumble through a few prepared remarks, gleefully announce that he wouldn’t be following the curriculum, and then transition awkwardly to a sales pitch for his other classes and his books (stacked optimistically on a back table). What the hell is this? The “project management” class I signed up for quickly devolved into a training about personal assertiveness and ways to get free airline upgrades. (And many more schemes were available in his $29.99 book!)

I looked around the room at the other attendees. I should note at this point that I was frequently an outlier in these rooms, as I was in the office I joined. At 22, I was exactly half the age of the next youngest team member. The training rooms were similar – folks in the middle of their careers, well-accustomed to these training seminars, and with expectations already calibrated several notches below my own. I looked around for fellow attendees to validate my incredulity, but mostly I found people seemingly resigned to suffer through the experience, get their CEU certificates, and trudge back to the office.

My surprise ossified into resentment and regret quickly, but I vowed that one bad experience wasn’t enough for me to write off the folder sailing from inbox to inbox back at the office. I’d probably just chosen the wrong vendor – or I got an unlucky draw with the hired-gun facilitator who hijacked the session.

Soon, there were so many more bad experiences

It didn’t take long to discover that that first experience wasn’t an aberration; it was a common state of professional education and an accepted standard for this type of experience. In exchange for the $150-$299/hour that it cost to attend these sessions, participants got documented proof of CEU completion. There was no guarantee or expectation of much beyond that slip of paper.

It took a good half dozen subpar classes before the excitement faded and I checked my name off the routing slips without looking through the brochures. Some time after that, I stopped looking in the folder altogether. Repeated disappointments in what I’d experienced led me to write off corporate learning for the next – gulp – decade.

I’d be willing to bet there wasn’t a more eager, engaged learner than me who ever touched that training folder. The first time I put an “x” next to my name on that routing slip, I was buzzing with excitement for the 3-5 learning opportunities I’d identified. And yet, I went from peak interest to complete disengagement within months. What went wrong?

How the folder – and its successors – let me down

It’s been many years since I’ve seen a routing slip or even a single hardcopy training brochure. As a consultant, employee, manager, and executive, I’ve been through dozens of additional workplaces since that first experience. The folder and slip morphed into emails and intranets, MOOCs, databases and LMSs, and now AI and agentic experiences. Consistently, I’ve found learning experiences that don’t just lose my interest. They shake my faith that a learning function will ever be able to supply me with the learning I want. Whether it was the course on writing white papers that became a viewing party for the instructor’s favorite SNL clips or the live webinar that used prerecorded clips that were played during Q&A, I’ve seen dubious value, listless and/or unprepared facilitation, and learners checking out. Regardless of the trendy technology applied or the lessons easily available to glean from learners, the quality of the learning I experience is not any better than when I started. Often, it’s markedly worse. And the sustained evidence made me feel as though the quality learning experiences I wanted were never a priority for the organization.

Recovering the lost learner – it’s easier to change than it seems

I started this note by observing that learning disengagement has been going on longer than the last 3+ years of AI. Naturally, the answers people are coming to me with are very AI-heavy. More agents, more personalization, more learning data ingestion, more recording of learning signals. I’m interested in where some of this can lead. But I’m not sanguine about it as the ultimate solution.

Spending the last decade within learning organizations has given me deeper insight than I had from the outside. And it has reinforced for me that what learners want falls very low down the list of priorities, if it’s even present at all. There’s so much emphasis on being a partner to the business, achieving business impact, and spending time on overall alignment. It’s often hard to fit in the learner’s perspective. Then again, if you never gather that perspective, you won’t be able to integrate it.

Here’s what I recommend – before launching a new engagement strategy, redesigning a curriculum, or (heaven forfend) signing a contract with a vendor for a new AI-infused tool: spend time with your learners. Interviews and focus groups are fine. But so are more casual conversations. Pull up a chair. Ask them what their workday looks like. Find out what they like and don’t like. Ask them what their favorite and least favorite learning experiences were. What was their favorite class/professor – and why? Who’s their favorite YouTuber/TikToker/Influencer and what makes them memorable?  (More on that in a coming note.)

Be prepared to be surprised. The conversations will bring up areas of disillusionment you didn’t know existed. And you’ll discover things people enjoy that will give you a fresh perspective on how to think about learning in the future. It feels so much more substantial to redesign the approach to communicating with learners, to hold strategy sessions or build personas. Or to buy that fancy new AI solution. But I’d bet that most learning organizations would make more progress on regaining their disengaged learners just by making more human-to-human connections.