Nobody Reads the Catalog. Stop Buying More of It.

Here is a number I'd like more L&D teams to compute, because it is both trivial to get and genuinely upsetting.

Take your content library. Count the titles. Now pull the usage report and count how many of those titles were opened by anyone in the last twelve months.

I've watched this exercise run at maybe a dozen companies. The ratio is remarkably stable: somewhere between 15% and 30% of the catalog has any usage at all. Which means most organizations are curating, hosting, reporting on, and paying for a large body of content that functions, in practice, as landscaping.

And the standard response to this discovery — I've watched this too — is to buy more content. Different library, better provider, sharper titles. Next year, same ratio.

At some point it's worth asking whether we've been solving the wrong problem.

Abundance was never the constraint

The theory behind the giant library is intuitive: people don't learn because good learning isn't available. Make ten thousand courses available and learning will follow.

Except availability hasn't been the constraint since roughly 2010. Your employees carry, in their pocket, free access to more instructional material than any corporate library will ever hold. YouTube alone has a better course on Excel than the one you licensed. If access were the bottleneck, the bottleneck would have dissolved a decade ago.

The actual constraints are three, and none of them is fixed by volume:

Time. Your employee has eleven minutes, not forty. A library doesn't create time; it creates an obligation to choose, which is a cost.

Relevance. The generic course teaches negotiation. The employee needs to negotiate with this distributor, whose behaviour is documented nowhere except in her colleague's head. Ten thousand generic courses do not contain the one thing she needs.

Permission. People learn when learning is visibly part of the job. If her manager has never mentioned development in a single one-on-one, no catalog on earth will change her Tuesday.

Buying more content addresses none of these. It just raises the number in the "titles available" cell of a slide nobody outside HR will ever look at.

What abundance actually costs

The library isn't free, and I don't just mean the licence.

Every stale course in a search result teaches the employee that the system can't be trusted. Do that twice and you've lost them — not from that course, from the platform. Trust in a knowledge system is destroyed retail and rebuilt wholesale, which is to say: barely.

Abundance also disguises absence. A company with four thousand titles feels well-provisioned, so nobody notices that it has zero content on its own products, its own process, its own client relationships — the things employees actually search for and fail to find. The library becomes a very expensive way of not noticing what's missing.

The failed-search log is your content strategy

If you take one operational thing from this piece, take this: go and read your platform's failed searches from the last quarter.

It is the single most honest document in your organization. It is written by your workforce, unprompted, in the moment of genuine need, and it costs nothing to obtain. Every entry is a person who wanted to know something, came to you, and left empty-handed.

At every company I've seen do this, the pattern is the same. Almost nothing in the failed-search log is generic. It's product names. Process steps. Client types. Internal systems. Policy questions. The stuff that no library sells, because no library knows about your company.

That log is your commissioning list. It is more valuable than any content roadmap a consultant will build you, and it updates itself weekly.

Fifty things beat five thousand

The organizations that get out of this trap tend to make the same shift: from acquiring content to producing and governing it.

That means giving every piece of content an owner and an expiry date, so the garden gets weeded instead of just planted. It means treating your internal experts as authors — the service engineer who filmed a two-minute workaround on her phone has more pedagogical value than a studio-produced module, because she's teaching the thing that actually happens. And it means the boring discipline of versioning, review, and approval, which is what a proper learning content management system exists to provide: not a bigger shelf, but a functioning publishing operation.

The AI shift makes this dramatically more achievable than it was three years ago. Drafting, summarizing, translating, versioning — the expensive parts of production have collapsed in cost. What has not collapsed, and what now matters more than ever, is governance: knowing what's current, who approved it, and which version the Chennai plant is actually running. When anyone can generate a plausible module in an afternoon, the scarce capability isn't authorship. It's editorial control.

But someone will say "we need breadth"

Yes — and this is the strongest objection, so it deserves a straight answer rather than a dismissal.

Breadth has a real function: it serves the long tail. Somewhere in your company there is a product manager who genuinely wants to learn SQL this month, and a finance analyst quietly preparing for a career pivot, and neither of them appears in any curated path you would ever have designed. A large library serves them at essentially zero marginal cost, and that is a good thing.

The mistake isn't having breadth. It's mistaking breadth for a program.

The workable arrangement is a barbell. At one end, a broad licensed library — bought as cheaply as possible, treated as infrastructure, never mentioned in a strategy meeting, quietly available to the curious. At the other end, a small, obsessively maintained body of internal content that only your company could produce, sitting at the front of every search and every path, and carrying almost all of the platform's actual reputation.

What kills learning programs is the middle: a mid-sized library of generic content, curated with some effort, promoted as though it were a strategy, and relevant to no one in particular. It costs real money, consumes real curation hours, and earns neither the long tail's gratitude nor the workforce's trust.

Barbell it. Cheap at one end, precious at the other, nothing in between.

The uncomfortable trade

I'll be honest about what this reframe costs, because the catalog has one enormous advantage: it's easy. You sign a contract and you have ten thousand courses. Producing fifty pieces of genuinely relevant internal content requires cornering busy experts, negotiating for their time, and doing editorial work that nobody will thank you for.

That's the whole reason the industry drifted toward abundance. Not because it worked — because it was purchasable.

So here's the test I'd apply to any content decision now: does this teach something only we know? If yes, it's probably the most valuable thing on the platform. If no, it's a commodity, and you should buy it as cheaply as possible, curate it ruthlessly, and stop pretending it's a strategy.

Nobody reads the catalog. They read the thing that answers their question. Build more of that.

Skills Caravan, an AI-driven enterprise solution for skill measurement and talent development (reskilling and upskilling) to enhance workplace.