The platform is set up, the academy logo shines on the intranet, the launch email has gone out. Six months later the usage figures paint a familiar picture: mandatory courses get completed, the rest barely gets a click.
The symptom: full platform, empty shelves
Look more closely and almost always the same pattern appears. The academy is full of bought-in courses on time management, communication and office software. The areas it was actually founded for are thin: the company’s own products, internal processes, the knowledge new colleagues urgently need in their first months.
Employees notice quickly. Anyone with a concrete question about their own job finds the answer not in the academy but with the colleague at the next desk.
So they do not come back.
Cause one: production takes too long
Developing company-specific e-learning the classic way takes 100 to 200 hours of work per learning hour (iSpring/Chapman). Produced externally, the market benchmark is up to EUR 40,000 per hour (Raccoon Gang, 2026). At that pace a small L&D team fills a handful of shelves a year, while the business units supply new topics faster than they can be handled.
Cause two: experts don’t write
The knowledge for company-specific content sits with experts who have other jobs. Filling in a storyboard or drafting slides is on nobody’s list. The result is a familiar ping-pong: L&D asks, the business unit promises, delivers a few bullet points weeks later, L&D asks again, the next round begins.
Cause three: length and format
Even where content is produced, it often does not fit everyday work. Classic mandatory courses reach around 25 percent completion, microlearning and interactive formats up to 90 percent (Continu, 2025). A forty-minute module on a topic that could be explained in three ends up on the pile for later.
An inventory before you plan more courses
Before the academy gets more content, a simple inventory pays off. For every topic the academy is supposed to cover, write down the name of the person who explains it best in the organisation today. Next to it, whether a training already exists. The list shows two things. First, where the academy is empty. Second, whom you need to fill it, and how stretched those people already are.
If the same name appears five times, you have found a single point of knowledge along the way.
What fills the shelves
The lever is not to make experts write. A half-hour interview with targeted follow-up questions yields more usable content than weeks of review rounds. Omnora turns it into a short training with voice-over, quiz and subtitles; production time typically falls by up to 80 percent per training hour. How to create more training without extra headcount is covered in the article on scaling training production.
Whether the academy then actually works is a separate question, covered in the article on measuring learning success. And to be honest: not every gap needs to become a training. Some topics are better served by a good contact person on the intranet than by a course nobody updates after three months.
