You Don’t Need More Content—You Need to Make it Relevant

We’ve all seen it: the LMS catalog groaning under the weight of hundreds—sometimes thousands!—of courses. Most of that content will never be touched. The good content is hard to find, and what people do stumble on often feels irrelevant. With generative AI making it “easier” than ever to churn out endless modules, libraries are ballooning even faster—but speed of production doesn’t equal impact. 

U.S. organizations still poured $98 billion into training in 2024 (with $12.4B to outside products and services, including content development) even as overall spend dipped 3.7 percent. And yet, one study found the average completion rate of online courses is only 12.6%. 

The problem isn’t a lack of investment. The myth of “more is better” has left L&D departments with bloated libraries and little to show for it. Here’s why it matters—and what to do instead.

The hidden costs of bloated content libraries 

The problem isn’t just wasted storage space. Bloated libraries actively work against L&D’s credibility in three ways. 

1. Employee disengagement 

When people can’t find what’s relevant to their individual needs, they disengage. A 20-minute course on “strategic thinking” doesn’t help someone draft a client proposal by Friday. A generic course on the concept of strategic thinking also doesn’t help someone consider your business’s USP, values, and frameworks.  

Over time, employees stop looking altogether, assuming the library won’t have what they need. In 2018, Gartner found only 20% of employees had the skills needed for their current role, and our 2025 State of the L&D Report shows little has changed in seven years. Only 35% of employees feel confident their organization can even identify and measure their capabilities.   

2. Manager misalignment 

Good leaders won’t sit idle when learning libraries miss the mark; they’ll find ways to fill the gap themselves.  

But—and it’s a big one—without validating that the material they’re accessing is relevant to your company’s capabilities and their role, there’s a risk they’ll learn and pass down: 

• Outdated processes that no longer match business operations 
• Narrow, biased advice that isn’t scalable across teams 
• Personal workarounds that aren’t documented and could create hurdles for everyone else while solving one individual’s problem.  

Instead of capability growth, people can actually regress in capability. Employees learn the wrong things, duplicate bad habits, and inconsistency takes root across teams. 

On the other hand, managers want their teams trained—but on the right things. When content libraries don’t reflect actual role requirements, managers waste time finding the right content for their teams (instead of doing the most valuable work of their role). 

3. Strategic blindness 

Leaders want to see impact. But without clear links between content and the capabilities the business needs, what leaders get is surface activity: completions checked, hours logged, usage numbers. None of that proves people can actually perform. 

The problem starts with thinking about content before capabilities. The purpose of content is to give people the knowledge to change behaviors. If you don’t know what’s missing, piling content onto the problem won’t make it any clearer. And forget content for a minute; if you don’t know what you need people to do, you have no basis for any learning, development, or talent initiatives at all.  

Why you shouldn’t be blinded by content formats 

Too often, the conversation around learning platforms gets stuck on technicalities like, can our LMS create and host SCORM files? How can this system make our next module more fun for people?  

That misses the bigger picture and where bloated libraries get dangerous. They often lean heavily on format diversity as a proxy for value: “we’ve got e-learning modules, podcasts, videos, and AR experiences, so we’re innovating!” But the core problem remains untouched: employees can’t find what they need, when they need it, in a way that drives performance. 

Now with generative AI, it’s even easier to spin up content in every format imaginable (and a lot of vendors will tell you this is key). But what matters isn’t the amount of content nor the package itself, but the purpose. Learning content should teach people something that changes behaviors. What that looks like depends on what people need to learn, not what’s trending in e-learning. 

Think about it: 

• A five-minute screen-recording of how your top analyst builds a quarterly forecast will beat a polished but generic “Intro to Excel PivotTables” module every time. 
• A PDF checklist of how to run a risk assessment written by someone in your org is infinitely more useful than a 90-minute click-through SCORM package on generic risk frameworks. 

Content is the tool, not the outcomes. The real question isn’t “what format will people click on?”, it’s “what capabilities do we need to build, and does this content help us do that?” 

How a capability-first approach fixes the content problem 

The fix isn’t simply trimming libraries or swapping formats. It’s shifting the foundation from “content-first” to “capability-first.” 

Here’s what that looks like in practice. 

1. Capture proven performance 

The best learning isn’t hiding in a library; it’s happening in day-to-day interactions. How a sales lead handles a tough objection. How a project manager gets a derailed meeting back on track. How an analyst frames data so the CFO actually listens. These moments are gold, but they usually stay trapped in your top performers’ heads. 

With Acorn, those moments don’t disappear. Our platform captures them in real time through capability assessments, pulling evidence from self, peer, and manager perspectives, and turns them into searchable, reusable learning assets. That evidence could be: 

• Short video clips of a presentation or client call 
• Annotated slide decks or briefing notes 
• Email threads showing how a message was framed to land with stakeholders 
• Process docs or checklists created on the fly to solve a problem 
• Peer or manager feedback describing successful work. 

Instead of fading into someone’s memory, those examples become structured, searchable content tied directly to the capabilities your business cares about. That means the next time someone faces the same scenario, they’re not stuck with generic training modules—they’ve got proof of what success looks like in practice. 

2. Validate before scaling 

Libraries become messy because anything and everything gets uploaded; the good, the bad, and the irrelevant. Leading with capabilities flips the script: only resources that change behavior make the cut.  

Validation happens through multiple signals: 

• Are employees using the resource in real workflows? 
• Do managers endorse it as an example of “good” performance? 
• Is peer feedback confirming its usefulness? 
• Do performance outcomes improve when it’s applied? 

That feedback loop essentially builds a robot vacuum into your library. Generic and useless content is turned away, while proven examples of real work rise to the top. 

And where AI is helpful is in analyzing usage patterns, clustering feedback, and surfacing content that isn’t being applied, helping keep your content catalog impactful. 

3. Map every resource to a capability gap 

This is where credibility is won back. A capability-first approach tags each piece of content to the business capability it supports—be it stakeholder management in leadership, digital fluency in IT, or patient care in healthcare. 

That means: 

• Employees see only what’s relevant to their role and capability gaps 
• Managers can coach with confidence, accessing real examples in real time 
• Leaders get visibility into which gaps are closing and where investment is still needed. 

Acorn’s roadmap makes it even more tactical: build content from assets you already have, capture and tag top-performer practices, and scale them across the org in days, not months. No authoring tool required. (See the Acorn approach to content here.) 

Starting with capabilities means you make your learning platform a trusted, go-to source of truth for how work gets done. And that transforms L&D from library curators to drivers of performance. 

The business impact of capability-driven content 

Content that’s designed to build capability doesn’t mean your library is smaller for the sake of minimalism. It’s leaner because every piece serves a purpose.  

• Organizations grow faster than competitors. McKinsey has found that companies investing in capability building are twice as likely to achieve stronger business performance than those that don’t. 
• Performance is always aligned with strategy. Deloitte found that high-performing organizations are 3.5× more likely to align L&D with business priorities than low performers. 
• High-performing L&D functions are 9x more effective at turning learning into results than those that don’t map learning to business needs.   
• Managers become productivity drivers. Managers account for 70% of the variance in team engagement, and engaged teams deliver 21% higher profitability. 
• Top performers become the standard. In complex roles, top performers can be up to 800% more productive than average employees. That becomes the baseline for everyone to learn from and replicate when you capture and publish their work. 

And trust compounds. Once employees, managers, and executives believe in the system, adoption spreads, engagement grows, and suddenly the L&D team has the credibility to shape strategy—not just react to it. 

Key takeaways  

When it comes to learning content, more isn’t better. More is just more. 

Content only matters when it builds the capabilities the business needs. Managers need the right examples to steer their teams, and top performers’ standards need to be captured and shared so excellence doesn’t stay siloed. Most importantly, relevance is the currency of trust. Employees, managers, and executives will only believe in L&D when content is practical, role-specific, and visibly tied to outcomes. 

Get that right, and capability-driven content becomes the business case: more relevant content libraries, tighter alignment, and proof that L&D is a driver of growth, not a cost center.