A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about something that feels slightly counter-intuitive in modern L&D.
Despite major advances in technology — better authoring tools, more templates, AI-assisted production and dramatically improved visual capabilities — the number of hours needed to create an hour of e-learning hasn’t fallen nearly as much you might expect.
At first glance, that feels strange. Surely better technology should mean dramatically faster development?
But the more I thought about it, the more I realised there’s another layer to this question that often gets overlooked. It’s not just about how much time gets spent creating e-learning. It’s also about where that time gets spent.
Same Output, Different Allocation
Two people can spend a very similar amount of time achieving the same outcome while using that time very differently.
That idea struck me recently while thinking about something completely unrelated to L&D: cooking.
For some people, cooking feels stressful, time-consuming and complicated. For others, it’s simply part of everyday life. The actual time spent preparing food may not be dramatically different, but the experience (and how the time gets allocated) can look completely different depending on skill, confidence and environment.
I think something similar happens in e-learning development.
The total hours involved may not vary as dramatically as we expect, but the allocation of those hours often changes significantly depending on the organisation and the context in which the work is happening.
Two Very Different Development Worlds
Broadly speaking, I suspect there are at least two very different “worlds” of e-learning development.
At one end of the spectrum is what I’d describe as a governance-heavy environment.
This is typically found in larger organisations and corporates, where creating a learning solution involves multiple stakeholders, layers of review, governance requirements, legal considerations, brand alignment and project management processes.
In these environments, a significant amount of time gets allocated to:
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stakeholder consultation
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documentation
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governance and compliance
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meetings and approvals
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review cycles and revisions, and
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cross-functional alignment
In many cases, organisations operating in this world deliberately streamline production through templates, design systems and standardised approaches in order to offset some of that overhead.
At the other end of the spectrum sits a more build-heavy environment.
This is more common in smaller organisations or teams with fewer governance layers and simpler decision-making structures. Much less time is spent on alignment and approval processes, meaning far more time can be allocated directly to bespoke design and production work.
The important point here is that neither environment is “better.”
Large organisations genuinely need governance and alignment structures. Without them, large-scale learning initiatives would quickly descend into confusion and inconsistency.
Smaller organisations, meanwhile, often benefit from agility and speed because they simply don’t carry the same organisational complexity.
The Time Isn’t Always Where We Think It Is
What’s interesting is that both environments can still consume a surprisingly similar total number of development hours. The difference is often where the friction exists.
In governance-heavy organisations, the friction frequently sits around co-ordination, alignment and review. In build-heavy environments, the friction often sits inside the hands-on production work itself, especially when highly customised or visually rich solutions are being created.
And this may help explain why technological improvements haven’t radically transformed development timelines in the way many people expected. Technology has certainly improved what we can create.
It has dramatically improved visual quality, interactivity, media handling and production capability.
But some parts of the process remain stubbornly human. Technology still struggles to reduce the complexity of stakeholder alignment, organisational decision-making and governance.
And once you move into the hands-on build phase, there is still a significant amount of manual assembly, judgement and refinement involved — even with AI entering the picture.
A More Interesting Question?
Which perhaps leads to a more interesting question altogether. If some of the biggest time costs in learning design are fundamentally human and organisational rather than purely technical, what exactly are we expecting technology to optimise?
Because maybe the future of L&D productivity isn’t just about building faster.
Maybe it’s about rethinking where effort, friction and complexity actually sit inside the wider learning system.
A fuller exploration of these ideas — including some of the tensions and trade-offs behind them — can be found in the original Learning Re-Framed article on Substack.*
