We say users resist change all the time.
But I’m not convinced they resist change nearly as much as they resist the way we ask them to change.
We ask them to sit through training, complete modules, attend webinars, search help sites, open tickets, and somehow remember all of it weeks or months later when the moment to use it finally arrives.
Then adoption disappoints, frustration grows, and we decide the problem is the user.
I think we’ve got that backward.
The bigger problem is the experience we’ve built around learning — and fixing it may be one of the biggest opportunities in customer education today.
I struggle to explain the real problem as it’s more than just a content problem. Yes, a lot of training is just bad. But that’s not the biggest problem. Not by a mile.
The real problem is who owns the content and where and when it's delivered. In other words, we can’t just make content and publish it to an academy and hope they show up. Most users don’t have time for that. Instead, we should make it easier for them to find relevant content.
For example, an academy is valuable, but it can't be the only way we deliver education. We tend to treat the learning experience and the academy as synonymous, when the academy is really just one surface among many places a user might encounter learning.
So, shouldn’t we be designing around the learner rather than fighting over where the content lives?
For decades, learning technology trained us to think in destinations: create content, put it in an LMS or academy, hope learners find it, and let them enroll, consume, and complete.
And as more destinations became available, more teams starting taking part. Marketing started publishing training content on YouTube. Sales started sending videos through Vidyard. Customers asked for copies of videos to put into their own LMSs. And pretty quickly, everything got out of sync, messy, and hard to track.
So, we retreated back, held our assets close, stopped sharing and said, “See! I told you so.”
But the people asking for content in other places weren't trying to undermine education. They wanted more of it.
The crux of the issue is: who cares how amazing our content is if the person who needs it can’t find it when they need it?
I believe the answer then requires addressing a two-fold problem. First, we need to distribute it better (get it on more surfaces). Second, we need to remove as much noise as we can by focusing on relevance (get the right stuff to them at the right time). Let me make the case for how you can tackle both problems.
Maybe the biggest innovation in customer education isn't another content format. It's distribution.
“I can’t manage content in 1,000 different places!” you say.
I agree. But that’s also the point.
I’m not suggesting we copy content to hundreds of destinations. I’m suggesting we separate the learning experience from the surface where someone consumes it.
Think about how software education usually works. A vendor builds excellent content in its academy. An enterprise customer asks, “Can we have that content in our environment?”
Now everyone gets uncomfortable.
The vendor doesn't want to hand over assets that can go outdated, get altered, or disappear into a black hole. The customer doesn't want to send employees into someone else's academy because they want to decide what's relevant and understand what their own people are doing.
Both sides are reasonable. The traditional model forces a bad tradeoff.
But what if content could be created and maintained once, while customers, partners, and other teams could shape where and how it appears for their users?
That changes the problem entirely.
Distribution gets learning closer to the user. Relevance removes the work of figuring out what matters.
Most training experiences still ask users to do an unreasonable amount of sifting. Browse the catalog. Pick the right course. Decide whether it applies to your job.
We’ve put almost all the burden on the learner to connect our content to the work they’re actually trying to do.
But it’s possible to know more about that person than we act like we do. We might know their role, the products they use, the features they haven’t adopted, the problems people like them commonly encounter, or even the topics they’ve shown interest in.
That context should shape what learning reaches them. And “reaches them” is important.
Don’t just personalize the academy and hope they show up. Surface the right experience where their attention already exists. Maybe it appears when they search. Maybe it arrives in Teams or Slack or Zoom. Maybe someone inside their company deliberately puts it in front of them because improving adoption is part of the organization's plan.
The goal isn’t to make people better at finding training.
It’s to make finding training increasingly unnecessary.
If we understand enough about the person, their work, and the moment they’re in, the learning should have a much better chance of finding them.
This is the shift I’m increasingly convinced customer education has to make.
The academy isn't going away. Neither are courses, certifications, structured learning, or great content. But the academy is a surface. It isn't the learning experience itself.
Content can be created and maintained in one place, distributed without losing control of the source, and surfaced through an academy, a customer environment, a product, a search experience, a communication channel, or somewhere we haven't thought of yet.
And then relevance determines what actually reaches the individual.
That distinction sounds simple when I write it out. Explaining it has been harder. New models tend to create new vocabulary, and sometimes the vocabulary gets in the way of the idea.
So maybe the simplest version is this:
Create learning once. Make it available wherever it needs to go. Know enough about the person to put the right experience in front of them at the right moment.
The academy can still be an important part of that system. It just isn't the product.
The learning experience is.
Moving beyond an academy-first model doesn't mean abandoning everything you've already built. See how structured learning, microlearning, and adaptive delivery can work together as part of a more modern learning experience.
Connect with the author on LinkedIn: Todd Kirk | LinkedIn