Click Next to Confirm You Are Aware That Scissors Are Sharp: Britain's E-Learning Industrial Complex

Click Next to Confirm You Are Aware That Scissors Are Sharp: Britain's E-Learning Industrial Complex

It begins, as all great spiritual crises do, with a cheerful loading bar.

You have just started a new job — or perhaps your employer has undergone a 'compliance refresh', which is what happens when HR has a quiet Tuesday and a budget that hasn't been fully spent. Either way, a link has appeared in your inbox. The subject line reads: Your Mandatory Training Modules Are Now Available. There are fourteen of them. Module one is called Working Together: An Introduction to Working Together.

Welcome to Britain's e-learning industrial complex, where a multi-million-pound sector has been constructed on the foundational premise that the British workforce cannot be trusted to move through the world without being formally notified, via animated PowerPoint, that fire is hot and harassment is bad.

The Curriculum, Annotated

Let us take a brief tour of the syllabus.

Module 3: Manual Handling Awareness. You will learn that heavy boxes should be lifted with your knees, not your back. This is information your grandmother gave you for free in 1987, probably while you were helping carry shopping in from the car. The module takes twenty-two minutes. There is a quiz at the end. One of the questions is: 'Should you lift a heavy object using: (a) your back, (b) your knees, or (c) a colleague who looks stronger than you?' Option C is, tantalisingly, marked incorrect.

Module 7: Equality, Diversity and Inclusion in the Workplace. You will be introduced to a cast of cartoon colleagues — there is always a Dave, a Priya, and someone in a wheelchair who exists solely to be included — and guided through a series of scenarios designed to establish that calling someone a racial slur is, on reflection, not ideal workplace behaviour. The target audience for this information appears to be people who have never previously encountered another human being.

Module 11: Cyber Security Essentials. Do not click suspicious links. Do not share your password. Do not, under any circumstances, email sensitive documents to your personal Gmail account 'just to work on them at home'. This last one is delivered with the gravity of a man who has seen things. The module ends with a certificate. The certificate has your name on it. It says you are now cyber-secure. You are not.

The Economy of the Bleeding Obvious

The e-learning sector in the UK is worth somewhere in the region of £3 billion annually, which is a remarkable sum of money to spend teaching people things they have known since primary school. Companies with names like LearnSphere Solutions, ComplianceFirst UK, and the magnificently optimistic KnowledgeBridge Pro churn out modules by the hundred, each one featuring the same stock-image office settings, the same earnest voiceover artist who sounds like she's narrating a documentary about meerkats, and the same triumphant little jingle when you pass the assessment.

The jingle is important. It is the dopamine hit at the end of forty-five minutes of clicking 'Next' through slides that tell you, in bullet-pointed detail, that bullying is unkind. Without the jingle, the whole enterprise would be exposed for what it is: a legal liability shield dressed up as education.

Because that, of course, is the actual point. The modules are not designed to teach you anything. They are designed so that, when something goes wrong — when someone does lift with their back, or does send that email, or does, against all available guidance, punch a colleague — the organisation can demonstrate that it discharged its duty of care by making you click through forty-seven slides about not punching colleagues. You clicked 'Next'. You got the certificate. The certificate is now in a folder on an HR server. Everyone is protected. Apart from the colleague who got punched.

The Quiet Spiritual Death of the Completion Screen

There is a specific psychological experience that occurs approximately forty minutes into a mandatory e-learning module, somewhere around the slide that asks you to 'reflect on a time when you demonstrated inclusive behaviour'. It is not quite boredom, and it is not quite despair. It is something richer and more particular: the sensation of being treated as simultaneously too dangerous to be trusted with scissors and too dim to be left alone without a cartoon character explaining what scissors are.

Britain's workforce is, by most measures, reasonably well-educated. It contains doctors, engineers, teachers, electricians, and people who have successfully navigated the M25 at rush hour without incident, which frankly requires more executive function than anything in the cyber security module. And yet every single one of them will, at some point this year, be asked to confirm, via multiple choice, that they understand it is inadvisable to store flammable materials next to an open flame.

The modules multiply, too. They are never retired. Each year brings new ones — AI Awareness for the Modern Workplace, Menopause Sensitivity in Teams, Carbon Literacy: Your Role in the Journey — while the old ones are updated with new cartoon characters and re-released as if they were director's cuts of beloved films. Your completion record resets. You start again. The loading bar appears.

A Modest Proposal

It would be churlish to suggest that all workplace training is useless. There are things worth teaching: specific software, technical procedures, genuine regulatory requirements that carry real complexity. Nobody is arguing against teaching a new hospital administrator how the patient records system works.

What we are arguing against — gently, with appropriate citations — is the industrialised production of content that exists purely to generate certificates of completion for things adults already know. There is a version of this country in which the £3 billion currently spent on modules about not drinking from bottles labelled 'POISON' is redirected towards, say, actual skills training. Apprenticeships. Technical education. Things that might conceivably change what someone is able to do.

But that version of this country does not have a jingle when you finish. And without the jingle, how would anyone know they'd learned something?

Module 14 of 14 complete. Congratulations! You are now fully compliant. Please allow up to five working days for your certificate to arrive by email.

Click here to begin next year's refresher.