The Netflixization of Employee Training

Technology is disrupting nearly every traditional industry, and employee training is no different. Technology firm Gartner estimates that by the end of 2022, a quarter of all workers will have used at least one consumer HR app for professional development. One of the driving forces for this is cost, in terms of both time and money. Emmanuel Le Bouille, a health program director for Groupe Auchan, an international retail group, found that when he had to implement a global well-being course for 260,000 employees, app-based solutions were his only option. "If we had tried to do this through the traditional classroom approach, it would have taken us at least four years," he says, adding that by using an online training platform, the costs were a tenth of the amount Auchan would have paid for classroom-based training: about $2 per employee as opposed to $20. "The alternatives to doing this digitally were too expensive and time-consuming," Le Bouille says. This type of technology has led to the “Netflixization” of employee training; that is, using portals to access different training modules, available as bite-sized, on-demand services.