Formal learning hours per employee have fallen from 35 a year in 2020 to just 13.7 in 2024. That’s not a dip. That’s a collapse — a 60% drop in four years.
And it’s not because people learned less. It’s because the way organisations deliver learning stopped matching the way people actually work.
This isn’t a minor L&D metric to note and move past. It’s a structural warning sign — and the organisations responding to it fastest aren’t buying more courses. They’re investing in relationships.
What is "learning debt," and why does it matter now?
Learning debt is what accumulates when the gap between the skills employees need and the skills they’re actually developing widens faster than anyone is tracking it. Like financial debt, it doesn’t cause a crisis on day one. It compounds quietly — in slower onboarding, weaker internal mobility, thinner succession pipelines, and skills gaps that only become visible once they’re already expensive to fix.
Two data points from TalentLMS’s 2026 research show exactly how this debt is building:
- Formal learning hours have crashed from 35 per employee per year in 2020 to 13.7 in 2024 — a 60% decline in just four years.
- 70% of employees multitask during training, meaning even the learning hours that remain are often happening in name only: half-attention split between a webinar tab and a Slack notification.
Put those together, and the picture is stark. Organisations are still budgeting for development. They’re still running programs, buying LMS licences, scheduling sessions. But the actual transfer of knowledge and skill — the thing all of that spend is supposed to produce — is quietly leaking away. You can be spending the same amount on learning and still be going backwards.
Why formal learning keeps losing ground
This isn’t a training-quality problem. It’s a structural one. Formal learning was built for a world with more slack in it — dedicated time, fewer competing priorities, less always-on pressure. That world doesn’t exist anymore.
Employees today are being asked to do more with less time, and “more with less” always squeezes the things that feel optional first. Learning — especially the standalone, calendar-blocked kind — gets treated as optional, even when it isn’t. It sits outside the flow of work, so it’s the first thing to get partial attention, get pushed back, or get skipped entirely.
A few forces are compounding this squeeze at once:
- Meeting load has exploded. Calendars that used to have room for a lunchtime webinar are now back-to-back from 9 to 5.
- Attention is fragmented by design. Notifications, chat tools, and always-on channels make sustained focus during a 60-minute module genuinely difficult, not just a discipline problem.
- Remote and hybrid work removed the “captive audience” moment. In-person training days created natural focus. A link in a calendar invite doesn’t.
- Skills are changing faster than curricula. By the time a formal course is built, reviewed, and rolled out, the skill it teaches may have already shifted.
None of these forces are going away. Which means the decline in formal learning hours isn’t a temporary dip that will self-correct — it’s the new baseline. Anyone planning learning strategy around a rebound in formal hours is planning for a world that no longer exists.
Why mentoring is different
Relationship-based learning works on a completely different mechanism than formal training, and that’s exactly why it’s holding up where formal learning is buckling.
It happens inside the work, not beside it. A mentoring conversation is usually about a real project, a real decision, a real challenge someone is facing right now. There’s no context-switch penalty because there’s no separate context to switch into. The learning and the doing are the same activity.
It’s relational, not transactional. You don’t half-listen to a person who knows your name and is invested in your growth the way you half-listen to a pre-recorded module. Mentoring builds in a form of accountability that no amount of “mark as complete” tracking can replicate — showing up matters because a person, not a system, is expecting you.
It flexes with capacity. A 20-minute conversation squeezed between meetings still delivers real value. A half-attended webinar often delivers close to none, because most formal content is only useful above a certain threshold of attention. Mentoring degrades gracefully under time pressure; formal training tends to fail all at once.
It compounds. Each mentoring conversation builds on the last one — the mentor already has context, so no time is spent re-establishing where things left off. Formal courses mostly start from zero every time, regardless of what the learner already knows.
It scales knowledge that never made it into a course. The most valuable things senior people know — how decisions actually get made, which relationships matter, what “good” looks like in practice — rarely make it into formal curricula at all. Mentoring is often the only channel built to transfer that kind of knowledge.
None of this makes mentoring a replacement for structured learning content — the two do different jobs, and a mature learning strategy needs both. But it does make mentoring the more resilient channel when time, attention, and formal learning hours are all under pressure simultaneously.
From "more content" to "more connection": the practical shift
The instinct when learning hours drop is often to build more content, or make training shorter and punchier to fight multitasking. Those are reasonable tactics, and worth doing. But they treat the symptom, not the structural cause — they’re still trying to win back dedicated attention in a world that has less and less of it to give.
The more durable fix is to build learning into relationships that already have a reason to exist: onboarding buddies who help new hires find their feet, cross-functional mentors who connect siloed teams, senior leaders paired with rising talent to protect institutional knowledge. Mentoring doesn’t compete with someone’s calendar for a dedicated slot. It travels with them, embedded in the working relationships they’re already navigating day to day.
For L&D and people leaders staring down a 60% decline in formal hours, that’s the real opportunity: stop trying to win back lost training time, and start investing in the learning channel that was never really “training time” to begin with — and was quietly delivering value the whole time.
This is also where a structured mentoring program, rather than an informal “grab a coffee sometime” approach, makes the difference. Ad hoc mentoring relies on people finding each other and staying consistent without any support. A platform-backed program brings equitable matching (so access to mentoring isn’t limited to whoever’s already well-connected), structure for the conversations themselves, and visibility for L&D teams into whether the relationships are actually working — turning mentoring from a nice-to-have into a measurable, scalable part of the learning strategy.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is learning debt?
Learning debt is the accumulating gap between the skills an organisation’s employees need and the skills they’re actually developing, caused by declining formal training engagement. Like financial debt, it compounds silently until it surfaces as skills gaps, slower onboarding, or weakened succession pipelines.
Why have formal learning hours dropped so sharply?
Formal learning hours fell from 35 per employee per year in 2020 to 13.7 in 2024 (TalentLMS, 2026), largely due to heavier meeting loads, fragmented attention from always-on communication tools, the loss of “captive audience” in-person training moments, and skills changing faster than formal curricula can be updated.
Does multitasking during training actually reduce learning outcomes?
Yes. With 70% of employees reporting they multitask during training (TalentLMS, 2026), a large share of recorded “training hours” involve divided attention, which reduces retention and skill transfer even when the hours are technically logged as completed.
Is mentoring a replacement for formal training?
Not a replacement — a complement. Formal training is still the right format for foundational knowledge, compliance, and standardised skills. Mentoring is better suited to contextual, relational, and tacit knowledge that’s hard to package into a course, and it holds up better under time and attention pressure.
How is mentoring more resilient to the same pressures that are shrinking formal learning?
Mentoring happens inside real work rather than alongside it, so there’s no separate time slot competing for attention. It’s relationship-based rather than content-based, which builds in natural accountability, and it delivers value even in short conversations rather than requiring a sustained block of focus.
What's the difference between informal mentoring and a structured mentoring program?
Informal mentoring depends on people finding each other organically, which tends to favour those who are already well-connected. A structured, platform-backed program adds equitable matching, defined program structure, and reporting — so mentoring becomes a consistent, measurable part of the learning strategy rather than something that happens by chance.
What can I do about it?
The learning debt crisis isn’t a call for more content. It’s a signal that the delivery model itself needs to change. Mentoring works with the flow of work instead of competing against it — which, at a moment when attention is the scarcest resource in the building, might be the single biggest advantage it has.
Ready to turn mentoring into your organisation’s answer to the learning debt crisis? Mentorloop helps you launch structured, equitable mentoring programs that fit inside the flow of work — not on top of it. See how Mentorloop works or book a demo to see how it could look inside your organisation.
