Every year, thousands of UK businesses purchase an off-the-shelf e-learning library. A few months later, the completion rates are embarrassing, the content feels generic, and nobody can quite remember why they bought it. Sound familiar?
It is one of the most common and most expensive mistakes in workplace training, and it happens for entirely understandable reasons.
The appeal is obvious
Off-the-shelf e-learning looks like a sensible decision on paper. The price per learner is low, the content is ready immediately, and the catalogue is enormous. For an L&D manager or a busy MD trying to tick a compliance box, it feels efficient.
The problem is that efficiency and effectiveness are not the same thing.
Why generic content underperforms
Your business is not generic. Your processes, your culture, your risks, your customers, and your language are specific to you. Off-the-shelf training is built for no one in particular, which means it resonates with almost no one completely.
Learners notice immediately when training has nothing to do with their actual job. Engagement drops. Completion rates fall. And the knowledge that was supposed to stick simply does not.
Worse, in regulated industries, a course completion on a system does not equal genuine understanding. If something goes wrong and the training content bore no real resemblance to how your organisation actually operates, that compliance tick becomes a liability rather than a defence.
The hidden cost nobody calculates
Businesses tend to measure the cost of training by what they paid for the licence. They rarely measure the cost of the training not working.
Consider what poor onboarding actually costs in extended time-to-competency. Consider the regulatory risk of compliance training that staff sat through but did not absorb. Consider the management time spent chasing completions on a platform nobody finds useful. Add those figures up and the cheap library starts to look considerably more expensive.
What good looks like
The organisations that get the most from digital learning share a few common characteristics. Their training content is built around real scenarios from within their business. Their platform carries their brand, not a third-party logo. Their learners can see themselves in the material. And critically, the content is updated as the business evolves, rather than sitting unchanged for three years.
This is not as complicated or as expensive to achieve as most businesses assume. The market has moved significantly in the past few years, and the cost of genuinely bespoke, professionally produced e-learning has come down substantially, particularly through managed subscription models that spread the investment across the year.
A more useful question to ask
Rather than "how much does e-learning cost?", the more useful question is "what is it costing us not to train our people properly?"
The answer to that question tends to reframe the conversation entirely.
Jason Satterly is the Co-Founder and Managing Director of Capytech UK, a Cambridge-based digital learning company with over 13 years of delivery experience. Capytech UK works with organisations across defence, professional services, logistics, and regulated industries to design, build, and manage bespoke digital learning ecosystems.
To find out more, visit www.capytech.co.uk or contact [email protected].