How to get corporate learning unstuck from the past | Startups Magazine

The training industry has had decades of investment, but the results aren’t paying off as investors might hope.

Growing up, I attended at least 10 schools across three countries. I was always the new kid, and I was expected to memorise facts in different languages without context or support. The only time learning ever stuck was when it felt fun. I didn’t need flashcards to memorise a new word when it was shouted during a football match or spoken while laughing in the playground, where learning didn’t feel like a chore.

I’ve carried that observation throughout my career. Building and running companies across Europe and Latin America for decades, I’ve seen the same challenges play out in learning from tiny startups to corporate giants. Mandatory training somehow makes the same mistake every time. It assumes that the problem is access to information, not retention.

Dragging corporate learning into the AI age

Companies spent $103 billion on workplace training in 2025, and the dominant format is still the tedious online quiz module that was considered progressive when social media first began. According to statistics by Harvard Business Review, only 12% of employees apply skills from L&D programmes to their work, and just 25% believe their training measurably improved their performance. The problem is not a lack of investment, but a lack of innovation.

Corporate learning has turned into a chore (one that I’m sure many of you have had to suffer through). It has, in effect, become an HR-mandated compliance exercise. Learning modules are often designed with auditors in mind, not the learners. The result is a generation of employees who have learned to click through training as fast as possible and remember almost none of it. Data suggests that people forget 50% of new information within one hour without reinforcement.

I once had a meeting with a Google engineer who said ‘I would pay money to not have to do my internal courses’. That quote stayed with me because this is one of the companies with the best resources in the world, and they have managed to make learning feel almost like a punishment.

The tragedy is that curiosity does not just disappear, it has been killed off. When someone joins a new company, curiosity is at its peak. They want to understand the product, the culture, the people around them. And then the onboarding module arrives and learning becomes just another thing on their to-do list rather than something they look forward to. With the working world facing an employee retention crisis, startups, particularly, will struggle to satisfy their employees’ desire for learning with agonising compulsory modules.

Neuroscience shows that when the brain is bored, it disengages. Cognitive performance drops, not because of any personal deficiency, but because the brain has started to close down. When it’s engaged, however, it sends more signals to the memory centre. This is the reason people remember something they learned in a game, or while laughing with a colleague, and conversely, it is the same reason they forget a compliance module the moment they close it.

Enjoyment is not a secondary benefit of learning, but a neurological precondition. Traditional learning hubs, such as schools, have been trying to implement these ideas for decades, but the corporate training industry has continued to ignore them.

From corporate bore to learning more

Part of the problem is the assumption that a blanket approach suits everyone. But one size does not fit all. People learn at different paces, through different formats, with different challenges. An identical module delivered to a hundred people is probably training very few of them well.

Game design figured this out a long time ago. Games adapt. They push you when you are ready and support your learning when you are not. They give you feedback in real time rather than a score at the end. They make you want to try again and again, something my co-founder, and gaming industry veteran, Linus Blomberg understands well.

AI now makes it possible to personalise learning at scale, meeting employees where they are rather than forcing everyone through identical content at an identical pace. It has become possible to meet each individual’s needs, identifying gaps, adjusting difficulty levels, and responding to how they actually learn rather than how a curriculum assumes they will. This is exactly why we founded Uniplay, an AI platform that transforms corporate learning materials into mobile games that drive real engagement and learning.

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For startups, making corporate learning fun matters more than you might think. I have seen the same problem play out in companies with ten employees and companies with forty thousand. But startups are in a unique position that larger organisations are not. They have the freedom to get it right from the beginning.

There are no legacy systems to protect, no procurement processes to navigate, no cultural inertia. Most companies waste the window in which someone joins, full of curiosity and wanting to learn, with homogeneous onboarding decks and mandatory tick-box modules. Startups are agile enough to actually design learning around their employees from day one, before bad habits calcify.

With AI accelerating the need to go into a continuous learning mode, we must adopt a fundamentally different relationship between employees and learning. Startups and giants alike have a choice: keep overlooking learning potential with annual compliance exercises, or make it something people actually want to do. They must stop making curiosity the casualty of corporate process. The companies that do will not just retain employees, they will build better ones. They will ensure their employees enjoy learning (and actually remember what they enjoy).

Knowledge is of foundational value for any company, and the companies that treat it as such will succeed. Trust the fun.