By Oli Huggins
Most workplace training is the fast food of learning. It is designed to go down easily, to be finished quickly, and to leave everyone feeling like something has been consumed, and like fast food it is optimised for exactly the wrong things. The metrics it reports back, completion rates, hours logged, modules finished, are the equivalent of counting calories served rather than asking whether anyone is actually better nourished. For a large company that can absorb the waste this is a tolerable inefficiency. For a small Welsh business, where every training pound is a real decision and the team is too small to carry passengers, it is money quietly going nowhere.
The reason this happens is that the industry measures what is easy to measure. Completion is easy to count, and content that is easy to complete produces good completion numbers, so the whole system drifts towards material that feels effortless and finishes cleanly. The trouble is that effortless and finished are not the same as learned. The course that goes down easiest is usually the one that demanded the least, and the one that demanded the least is the one that changed the least about what your people can actually do on Monday morning.
AI has made this worse and clearer at the same time. It has made it trivial to generate endless smooth, easy content, which means the supply of the fast-food version is now effectively unlimited and close to free. That sounds like a saving until you notice that the content was never the scarce thing. The scarce thing, the part actually worth paying for, is proof that the training changed what someone can do, and that is precisely the part the completion-rate model does not measure and the easy content does not deliver.
This is the problem ExpertEdge was built to solve. We turn books from expert publishers into courses designed to certify what a learner can actually do at the end, not just confirm they reached it, on the view that content is now commodity and verified capability is the only part worth the spend.
The practical move for any small business owner this year is to stop buying training by the hour and start buying it by the outcome. Before you renew anything, ask the simple question the completion rate hides, which is whether at the end of it your team can demonstrably do something they could not do before. If the honest answer is that you do not know, you are buying fast food.
Oli Huggins is CEO of ExpertEdge (expertedge.org).