The 10 Lies of Learning, Lie #10: If We Build It (a Learning Program), They Will Come

Welcome to our countdown of the biggest lies in Learning & Development. We’re starting with #10 – a comforting fiction that has launched a thousand LMS implementations.

You’ve seen the movie Field of Dreams. Kevin Costner hears a whisper in his cornfield: “If you build it, he will come.” He constructs a baseball diamond, and sure enough, the ghosts of baseball legends emerge from the corn field to play ball.

It’s a beautiful metaphor. It’s also terrible L&D strategy.

The Comforting Delusion

The L&D version goes something like this: “If we build this learning program/platform/curriculum/portal, employees will flock to it, consume the content, and transform into high-performing versions of themselves.”

This belief has fueled countless initiatives:

The launch of learning management systems that become digital ghost towns
The creation of content libraries that sit untouched like the dusty encyclopedias of yesteryear
The development of comprehensive curricula that employees sign up for only when mandated

The reality? Most corporate learning initiatives see engagement rates that would make a failed restaurant owner feel better about their life choices.

Why This Lie Persists

This myth persists because it’s comforting. It allows L&D teams to focus on what they often do best—designing and building learning experiences—while postponing the much harder work of driving engagement, measuring impact, and changing behavior. It’s comforting and frankly, easier, to focus on outputs and “doing stuff” rather than actual outcomes. And, historically, leadership may have gone along with this philosophy realizing it’s just easier to measure the hind-ends in seats rather than the improvement of performance. When your success metrics are about production rather than consumption and application, you’ll naturally focus on building rather than adoption.

The Uncomfortable Truth

People don’t naturally gravitate toward learning opportunities—even excellent ones—unless specific conditions are met:

They see clear, immediate value – Not vague promises of “development” or “future opportunities,” but concrete benefits to their current work challenges.
The friction is minimal – Every click, every login, every form, every approval process reduces the likelihood of engagement by a significant margin.
Social proof exists – When peers and leaders visibly value and participate in learning, others follow. When learning happens in isolation, motivation plummets.
Timing is right – Learning that isn’t available at the moment of need might as well not exist for most busy professionals.
The environment supports application – If new skills can’t be applied immediately in the work environment, they’re quickly forgotten and the learning experience is retroactively deemed worthless.

Research Confirms What We Already Know

This isn’t just conjecture. A 2019 LinkedIn Learning report found that 94% of employees would stay at a company longer if it invested in their learning and development.^[1] Yet the same report showed that the biggest challenge for talent developers was getting employees to make time for learning.

Similarly, Josh Bersin’s research has consistently shown that the average employee has only 24 minutes a week to devote to formal learning.^[2] That’s less than 5 minutes per workday—barely enough time to log into most learning platforms, let alone complete a module.

The Corporate Executive Board (now Gartner) found that 57% of employees expect learning to be more “just in time” than ever before.^[3] They don’t want to learn something months before they’ll use it; they want support at the moment of application.

From “Built It” to “Embed It”

The alternative approach is to stop thinking of learning as a destination and start embedding it into the workflow:

Shift from courses to resources – Instead of comprehensive courses, create bite-sized resources that address specific problems
Focus on performance support – Build tools that help people do their jobs better right now
Make learning social – Create conditions where learning happens through collaboration
Remove friction – Every barrier between the learner and the content reduces engagement exponentially
Market relentlessly – If you build it and market it effectively, they might come

What This Means For L&D

If you’re in L&D, this truth demands a mindset shift:

You’re not just an instructional designer; you’re also a marketer, a user experience designer, and a behavioral economist.
Your job isn’t done when you launch the program—in many ways, it’s just beginning.
Engagement metrics aren’t nice-to-haves; they’re core indicators of whether your solution is viable.
Executive sponsorship and manager involvement aren’t optional extras; they’re essential prerequisites.

A Real-World Example

One large industrial company I worked with scrapped their traditional approach to sales onboarding training. Instead of building a comprehensive curriculum and flying instructors all over the map, expecting participation, they:

Focused on the core expected outcomes – what (REALLY) to our new salespeople need to know, Day/Week/Month 1.
Created a mobile application-based training module that was interactive and modeled after the real daily workflow
Supported same with job aids
Continuously conducted soft, simple check-ins with regional leaders to assess effectiveness

The result? Speed to market increased by nearly 50% and sales went up by nearly 10%.

They didn’t build a place to play; they brought the game to where people were already playing.

The Path Forward

If you’ve invested heavily in the “build it and they will come” approach, don’t despair. You don’t need to scrap everything and start over. Instead:

Audit your current offerings from the learner’s perspective. How much friction exists between them and the content? Look for the red-herrings of 80-20 phenomena (i.e. an abnormal flocking of majority users to a minority pool of content).
Talk to your audience about where and when they need support. Not in generalities (“What training would you like?”) but in specifics (“What’s the hardest part of your job right now?”).
Repackage existing content into smaller, problem-centered resources that can be accessed at the point of need.
Build a marketing plan for your learning initiatives that’s as sophisticated as the one your company uses for its products.
Rethink your metrics to focus on engagement, application, and impact rather than just completion.

In the next installment of our series, we’ll explore Lie #9: “Learning is over here in the training room; work is over there in the office”—another artificial boundary that undermines effective development.

Until then, take a hard look at your learning programs. Are you expecting people to come simply because you built something? Or have you created the conditions that make engagement inevitable?

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References

[1]: LinkedIn Learning, “2019 Workplace Learning Report,” 2019.
[2]: Josh Bersin, “The Disruption of Digital Learning: Ten Things We Have Learned,” March 2017.
[3]: CEB (now Gartner), “The Future of Corporate Learning,” 2016