I was chairing a Learning Technologies webinar last week (please come along – they’re good fun) and a question was asked by the presenters:

How much of your current learning catalogue do you think gets used?

Answers ranged from 10% to 80%. One person didn’t know; someone else said 80%.

Others landed at 40% and pointed to mandatory training as the driver. Which means the voluntary, developmental, capability-building stuff — the part L&D is most proud of — is mostly sitting unused.

Then came the question that is more important: how are we counting? Completion? Launch? Time in module? Four people accessing a niche compliance module 100% of the time it is needed is a different problem to a general skills library that nobody touches.

What I think the data is actually telling us is that L&D has been building catalogues, while what organisations need is capability.

Those are not the same thing. A large library that mostly goes untouched is not a sign that the organisation is not learning but a sign that the library is not where the learning is happening.

Idea 23 from 50 More Big Ideas: the size of your catalogue is not a measure of your ambition. It is a measure of what you have not yet been willing to stop doing.

If I asked how much of your current learning catalogue is used, what would be your honest number?