The 7% Problem: Why Learning Has Left the LMS, and What L&D Must Do Next

Julia: Welcome to L&D in 20, your go-to resource for all things workplace learning, brought to you by Go1. I'm your host, Julia Nieradka, Manager of Customer Success at Go1. Today on the show, I am very excited to be joined by Lori Niles-Hofmann, Co-founder of 8Levers and one of the most respected voices in learning technology and workforce transformation.

Lori is a senior edtech and AI strategist with more than 25 years of experience, spanning international banking, management consulting, and marketing. 

Throughout her career, she's helped organizations navigate the realities of digital transformation, bringing a rare combination of strategic vision and practical execution.

Known for her refreshingly candid perspective on learning technology, Lori has spent decades working behind the scenes of edtech initiatives, giving her deep insight into what's truly possible, what's simply hype, and what it takes to create meaningful change. Lori, welcome to the show. 

Lori: It is an absolute pleasure to be here, and I also have to say, I love hearing my introduction being introduced in a Canadian accent.

I know you're in Australia, but there is just something about the timbre of, of a Canadian, a Canuck accent. We'll try not to say, "Eh," but it is, it is wonderful. Thank you. 

Julia: We'll do our best. You're very welcome. And so, um, everyone's in for a treat today. We've got two Canadians here to talk about L&D and, and edtech initiatives.

And in today's deep dive, we're exploring a bold idea “Maybe the problem isn't the learner and it's the system”. So we'll discuss what the Weight of Development research reveals about engagement, friction, and learning ecosystems, and what L&D leaders can do to build more effective learning experiences for the future So I'm very excited to dig into this with you, Lori, and our first question is: 

What did the weight of development research reveal that you think the market is still underestimating?

Lori: A lot. And it's funny because I think if you are in L&D, if you're in-house, you're probably not all that surprised, and it's actually very validating. But I think for leaders in L&D, it was very, very surprising. So some of the things that we saw were that employees wanna learn, and they are learning from each other.

They're going to their peers. It is a part of everyday work. But when we look at what's happening on our formal systems, we're only getting to 7%. That 7% of people are actually saying, "I'm going to the learning management system first to find the answers that I need." So this is really, really eye-opening because it's really showing a supply and demand disconnect.

And also, when people go to their peers, it's not saying that that information is bad, but it's also the risk of perpetuating practices that aren't the best for the organization because it hasn't gone through a, a, a vetting process. So that is a, a, a really, really big one. Also, that employee development is really important to individuals.

It's not something that they're seeing as a nice-to-have. It's something that they're seeing as a need-to-have, and they are seeking it out like a sponge in any place that they can. But clearly, that 7% engagement on the LMS is something I think we need to take a really hard look at. I think the other thing that was really interesting is that they were also commenting that a lot of times, the, the learning isn't customized or personalized to themselves, and that's something that we were never able to do before, but we now can do with AI, where the one-size-fits-all course is not something that suits everybody, and they're recognizing that.

So this was a wealth of information, and what I also really loved is I think that anybody in L&D, it's a piece of, of research that they can actually take back to their organizations and say, "Hey, look, we, we can do better, and this is evidence to say that we should." 

Julia: Absolutely, and when you say underestimating, in your opinion, who do you feel like is underestimating it the most?

Do you feel like it's L&D, HR, executives, vendors, or all of the above? 

Lori: I actually think in a lot of organizations it's executives and vendors. I do think when I talk to people who are in the trenches of L&D, they know this because they see the numbers every day. They're within the systems. And I know they want to believe, but they also do see the numbers that, that come out and they do see statistics.

When it comes though to executives, they're very binary, and in fairness, they're not seeing how the sausage, or as I like to say as a vegetarian, the tofu gets made. So they assume that if you build it, they will come. We have the platform. That is where they're going, and it works. And the vendors are looking at it and saying, "Well, why wouldn't you go to this?

We've spent so much time with analytics and product development, and we've hired the best product managers. Why would they not go to these places?" So this is a bit of an eye-opener for them to challenge some of those beliefs that they have about how these systems work. 

Julia: I hear this a lot. You know, people are s- lack of time or- maybe we don't want to, and that's the perception, and that's sort of the easy way to look at that 7%. Or do you think that the system is asking too much of people at times? 

Lori: I think the system is asking too much of people. There's never enough time. We know this, but we don't help ourselves. Mm. So as I was saying before, if we make people go through an hour course, click next to continue, or listen to a podcast that's, well, like you're doing right now.

Hopefully, this one is useful. But if you're listening to, you know, 45 minutes and you're not able to isolate the piece that you need to get to perform your role, um, and you're having to sift through all of this information, that's not helping the time problem. That's actually expanding it. So we need to get better at being personalized and being able to look at somebody and saying, "Jules, I know where you work.

I know who is your manager. I know what projects you're working on, and I know the KPIs of the business. Can I put that together and package that to deliver precise and the most efficient learning possible for what it is that you need to do?" And in fairness, when some people listen to me talk about this, they think I'm being very, very critical.

I'm not. What I'm saying is that's what we could do before, but we can do better now. So it's simply a matter of our tools have improved, the technology has improved, and we would be very remiss if we didn't move forward at the same pace that that is happening. 

Julia: And why do you think organizations so often misread low engagement as a learner problem, and vendors for that matter, too, rather than a system problem?

Lori: There's a few reasons. The thing that I've always been perplexed about is even the fact that we call learners learners, it implies this teacher-student hierarchy. 

And if we've instructed them, and I've been a teacher. I was a high school teacher for teenagers who were not doing so well in a regular system, uh, working with them, and there's this idea that if you order them, they will do it.

That sort of carrot stick does not always work, and it really isn't inspiring. I also think, too, that if organizations really want to accept that the system is the challenge, it requires a lot of introspection. It also requires looking deep at, to, at things like culture. It's looking at things like how managerial leadership is being developed.

It also requires looking at how work is getting done, and are we actually doing the things that we need to do? And that can be desperately, desperately uncomfortable for leadership. It's very, very confronting. So it's easier to say, "Well, they didn't do it. Let's just assign it again, and make them do it, and make the managers enforce that."

That's not the manager's job, and if they aren't doing it, there's probably a bigger problem. 

Julia: Mm-hmm. I think that's a really good indicator, and I'm really curious to know from your perspective if there is a metric or signal for that matter that you wish organizations or vendors would pay more attention to beyond just the kind of vanity metrics like completion rates, engagement rates in these systems?

Lori: I wish the one that I wish that they would have a look at the most is actually drop-offs. Mm. Like, when do people, like, just go into something and completely walk away? This is the digital equivalent of walking into a classroom, seeing the facilitator, looking around, and being like, "Peace out. I'm out of here."

And a lot of times they don't look at that. They're, they're looking just at the what did they complete, what did they do. They're also not looking at search terms. They're also not looking at data outside of the learning management system, and that I think is a really big one. They're losing ground if they're not going to places like if you have, you know, in communication boards or if you have, you know, community engagement places where people are going, Teams, Slack, any of those places.

They are missing that because that actually I can bet nine times out of 10 is going to be where the real gold is happening and where people are actually communicating and learning and sharing. It's not happening within the LMS even if the LMS or the LXP has some of those engagement features em- em- embedded.

That's not where, that's not where they are. 

Julia: Absolutely. And what parts of the learning system are creating the most friction today, in your opinion? 

Lori: The fact that you need to log into it , the fact that you need to search for it, the fact that you can't always search within SCORM files, you have to know the title.

I mean, we are solving for some of these things. What's also happening is I don't see a two-way dialogue between a tutor or a coach or a guide. It's basically just a prompt bar with a cursor that's flashing, and to me, that is a very missed opportunity. That is when a tutor or a coach can say, "All right, Jules, I know projects you've been working on.

I know what you have in your pipeline. I know things about you, where you struggled, where you've excelled. I'm gonna help guide you in ways that are personal to you and also in ways that are building skills that are needed by the organization." Otherwise, I often say that if we just leave the prompt bar open and it's just that flashing cursor, it is no different than saying, "Here's a content library," or if we wanna go really old school, "Here's an encyclopedia.

Learn whatever you want." And learn whatever you want, it feels warm and fuzzy, but it's also draining the tax on the learner because they're investing their time and their, you know, intellectual collateral and their cognitive load on things that may not be important to the business. So these are things that are causing a lot of friction.

Julia: What friction do you think managers experience when they're also expected, just touching on a point you said earlier- Mm-hmm ... when they're also expected to support this level of development for each individual on their team? Knowing that we're moving into a space now where managers are managing more people.

Yeah. Their teams are bigger with AI. It's, it's caused, you know, th- this growth in a manager's remit when it comes to head count. Mm-hmm. So what friction do you think managers are experiencing in supporting this? 

Lori: Well, I think we've not set up managers fairly, and should this even be a managerial role?

Managers are not L&D experts. They will not know the corpus of knowledge of the company. They may know their particular expertise. They may know what's happening within their team. But it's kind of like looking at a people manager and saying, "Okay, I want you to guide every person in your team to learn a different language.

Okay, so Jules, you're going to learn Greek. Lori, you're going to learn Polish. David, you're going to learn Spanish." But that manager is not an expert in any of those languages, but they sometime, somehow have to navigate it, and they have to predict what's next, and they have to guide that person along.

Some of the most intriguing corporate structures that I've seen is when you allow people to be individual contributors and still excel within an organization without direct reports, and you remove that from them. But what you do is people who are really good people managers and who are really good coaches, they take on that part.

So the manager is really managing the day-to-day project, the day-to-day things that need to get done, the KPIs, but then you have another person who's actually doing the people development and the growth, because those things are often at, at odds with each other, especially when it comes to tech. I worked with a wonderful chief product officer at a, at a company who famously said, "Please don't give me anybody to report into me.

I will be on the floor with them coding and working through problems and being with them, but if you want me to develop them and start doing plans for them, succession planning, no, that's not what I do." And we brought somebody else to do that, and I think we need to rethink some of those models. Uh, some companies also, too, are even using virtual coaches to take, to take on part of that, and we'll, we'll see where that ends up.

But I think the manager, it's, it's a bottleneck for them, and I have compassion for the p- the situation that they're in. 

Julia: That's a really good point, and I think Knowing what we know and some of the amazing insights you've given us just now, if an L&D leader wanted to redesign one thing first, regardless of the size of the organization they work, work for- Sure, sure ... where would you tell them to start? 

Lori: Two places. I think the first thing is I would be, and I've done this personally myself, I separate out compliance training from everything else that we're doing. 

 And the reason for that, and I mean compliance with a capital C where you have to report to regulators on an annual basis, and they define how the, the learning must be structured and how many questions you need to have, et cetera.

Because what I find happens is that structure then starts to creep into the, well, everyday learning, I'm just gonna call it for that. And that holds things back. So I think that's the first thing is I say, "Okay, that is a very different deliverable. We are going to put that in its own team that's managed with its own cadence, delivery dates, et cetera."

Then I'm actually gonna look at my team and say, "Okay, what about if we went course-less?" Meaning, what if we weren't a content factory, or we weren't producing one-size-fits-all courses, what could we actually do? What does it look like when we become orchestrators of upskilling, or what I call right scaling, which is ensuring that people have the right skills for what the organization needs and for their growth.

And that is a fundamental shift, and it makes people very, very nervous. But if we are going to truly embrace the possibilities of, of AI, particularly agentic AI, that is where we need to sit. 

Julia: Absolutely. And what do you think the research tells us about the future operating model for learning now? 

Lori: Well, they're telling us all of these things.

They are still learning. They're learning from peers, so I think we need to find ways to capture that from peers. I think that's a really big one. I worry about what, you know, I call corporate amnesia, which is things that people know that as they move on from the organization, you know, suddenly we're, we're wondering, "Okay, who knows how to program the coffee maker?"

Um, there's, there's deeper things than that, but, but those things tend to leave with them. But I think it also points to we need to go where the learners are. We need to rely less on the managers, as I've been talking about before, and rely, I think, a lot more on AI tutors and coaches to backfill into, into some of those, those roles.

And I think we also need to embrace that there is a hunger and an appetite to learn and develop. The fact that we're seeing 7% does not mean that people don't care, and we have to separate out the two. It means the system that we've designed for them is not palatable to them for the way that they are learning.

I also think, too, we need to look at psychological safety. I did not coin that term, but we need to look at if, if people are looking at other ways to learn and other ways to get information, are we not providing the space for them to actually practice and experience? And that can be very detrimental to a company.

Julia: So we always finish the show with three quick-fire practical questions.

So the first one is, what's in your feed? 

Where is your go-to resource and spot for practical L&D and HR advice? 

Lori: So my favorite place to go is Red Thread Research. What they do is so interesting is that their research is never influenced by vendors, so they give you the real deal. And I love it so much.

Which actually, too, reminds me of how much I really loved the white paper that we did with Go1, because you really called the baby ugly, and you weren't afraid to do that. And I think so much that we read is all positive, and this is wonderful, and everybody's doing this. And I really applaud you for saying, "Actually, we need to look at the reality of this."

And that's another reason, too, that I, um, I appreciated the white paper, as well as Red Thread Research. 

Julia: It's a great resource. 

So who's at your table? And at this time of rapid change, who do you think is a key stakeholder that HR and L&D leaders should partner with across the business, and why? 

Lori Niles-Hofmann: Chief AI officer.

What we are doing is trying to solve for our own ecosystems. We're trying to find our own solutions. We're talking to vendors. I really don't believe that these one-off or separate initiatives or portals into learning, even if they're in Slack or Teams, are going to be the place where people go. I think it's all going to need to be streamlined.

We also are going to need to plug into the same places that data is also located within the organization. So how do we plug into where knowledge management sits? How do we plug into where product development is? The chief AI officer is looking at those links. We're seeing it just from, from our lens. And also impressing upon the chief AI officer, because they're under incredible amount of pressure to do adoption of AI, that's where also we can help.

So it's a symbiotic relationship, but that's the person who needs to be at the table. 

Julia: And what's the feeling? So finish this sentence for us, Lori. 

At its best, learning at work should feel... 

Lori: Safe. 

Julia: Lori, thank you so much. I've absolutely loved our discussion today. Enjoyed having you on the podcast, and we're so grateful, so thank you.

Lori: Thank you, Jules, and I'll send a moose over.

Julia:Thanks for tuning into the show. I'm your host, Julia Nieradka, and that wraps up another episode of L&D in 20. To continue the conversation, send me a message on LinkedIn through the link in the show notes. Your comments will help inform future episodes, and who knows, maybe we'll even answer some of your questions on the show.

We'll catch you on the next episode, and until then, keep learning. 

Producer: This show is brought to you by Go1, the trusted learning foundation for a future-ready workforce. Go1 helps organizations build capable, compliant teams through the world's most comprehensive learning ecosystem, making learning easier to manage, measure, and scale with confidence.

To learn more, visit go1.com or click the link in the show notes. And to stay up to date on future episodes of L&D in 20, subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.