Author: Eveline Van Eyck, Customer Success Coach @FLOWSPARKS
Every L&D calendar has one: the e-learning everyone has to take, regardless of what they already know. The intent is fairness, since the same content, standard and test apply to everyone. The result is something else. Your most experienced people end up quietly re-learning what they mastered years ago, and the training budget as well as their calendar disappear along with it.
The cost that never shows up in a report
Uniform e-learning has a hidden line item, and that is relearning. Every minute a skilled employee spends going through material they already know is a minute the organization doesn’t get back, and it never appears on any invoice because nothing broke and nobody complained. It simply disappeared, quietly, and it scales with everything else in e-learning.
Take a mandatory compliance e-learning course of 90 minutes, identical for everyone and repeated every year. In a team of 200 people, some are seeing it for the first time while others are seeing it for the ninth, and those veterans really only need about ten minutes, the part that actually changed since last year. Run the same course for all of them anyway, and roughly 120 experienced employees each lose about 80 minutes to content they have already mastered. That is more than 2,600 hours in a single year, for a single course, in a single team, and none of it shows up as lost time anywhere because the course was completed and the box was ticked.
There is also a cost that is harder to put a number on. Employees who are made to sit through what they already know slowly stop trusting the training program to respect their time, and that erodes their attention for the training that actually does matter to them.
Skip what’s known
The instinct when e-learning feels ineffective is to add more of it, whether that means more modules, more detail or more checkpoints. But the 2,600 lost hours above weren’t caused by too little content. They were caused by giving everyone all of it, regardless of what they already had.
This is exactly the problem we built FASTLANE for: an adaptive learning path, native to FLOWSPARKS’ authoring tool, that starts with an intake test measuring what each learner already knows. Employees who prove they’ve mastered a topic are exempted from it, while the rest are guided through the full path, straight to the parts they haven’t mastered yet. The experienced employee skips ahead, the newcomer follows the full path, and both end up meeting the same standard.
The result is straightforward: the same standard, reached with less time spent in training overall, because no one is paying twice for what they already know.
Curious how much training time your team could get back with FASTLANE? Get in touch to see how FLOWSPARKS’ adaptive learning path could cut training time in your organization.