Seeing all the platforms in the market of corporate learning and lifelong learning, you'd expect that employees are seeing an unprecedented level of learning. But when you look at your own offices or your friends' this is not really the case. So what's causing this gap?

Some HR and L&D managers might scratch their heads trying to figure it out, but most employees will tell you right away: the key bottleneck is simply employee engagement ("the engagement epidemic"), since many of these learning solutions take the joy away from learning!

To understand why these platforms don't always cater to the employee-learner, we have to understand the whole design and sale process of such tools: from the get-go the ultimate customer is the Human Resources or Learning & Development manager that will choose to try the product, not the actual end user. This guides all the product decisions!

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Let's look at the data. 92% of employers in the US offer some educational benefits, and 63% offer tuition assistance/reimbursement programs. Of those, however, only 1-5% apply to these programs, and only 40% of them are even aware of their existence.

If we look at other types of learning, we find that we greatly overestimate how much time employees learn at work: it only comes down to 24 minutes a week of learning.

So what can employers do to address this issue?

One clear solution is involving more learners in the sales process, as testers and product researchers.

Secondly, employers should move towards using products that drive bottoms-up engagement and give room to the employees to learn in their spare time however they choose to. If we trust employees with the company's resources and brand, why don't we trust that they'll utilize their budget best if given the right resources?

Sunlight is looking to drive this employee engagement by allowing employees to use their benefit budgets on any learning resource in the world. Working with manager-led playlists, recommended skills and ready-made playlists from top world experts, Sunlight is addressing the "engagement epidemic" in Learning & Development, one budget dollar at a time!