Your LMS Is a Library, Not a Gym

Nobody got fit by owning a bigger library of workout videos. Yet the L&D win of the year is often we added 400 courses.

A library gives you access to content. A gym gives you deliberate practice under load, with feedback, until the movement changes. Capability is built in the second place, not the first. Most LMS platforms are excellent libraries pretending to be gyms.

Access is not ability. Watching is not doing. A full catalogue and a capable workforce are different achievements, and only one of them shows up in the work.

Why the distinction is not pedantic

The research on expertise is blunt about this. Anders Ericsson's work on deliberate practice showed that skill is built through focused, effortful repetition with feedback, not through exposure to information. A course delivers information. Practice delivers skill. Confusing the two is how organisations spend heavily on learning and see little change in capability.

It is the same trap as completion rates: an input metric standing in for an outcome. A big catalogue and high completion tell you people accessed content. They tell you nothing about whether anyone can now do the thing.

Audit the ratio

For any skill that matters, look at what you actually provide, and sort it honestly into two piles.

• Library: courses, videos, articles, webinars. Access to information.

• Gym: role-plays, simulations, coached practice, real-work application with feedback.

• Then look at the ratio. Most organisations discover it is almost all library.

The skeptic's objection

Our completion and catalogue size are strong.

Those are library metrics. They are real, but they measure availability, not capability. Keep the library; it has its place. But if you want capability, you have to build the gym, deliberate practice, feedback, and application, because that is the only place ability is actually made.

Sources

• K. Anders Ericsson and colleagues, research on deliberate practice and expert performance (widely cited in the science of skill acquisition).

Written by Mahesh Tharani. Connect on LinkedIn.