The click is the only real thing. A soft, plastic compression under my index finger. It’s the metronome of my afternoon, a steady beat marking the passage of not time, but of slides. Slide 9 of 49. A stock photo of impossibly happy people pointing at a whiteboard full of meaningless graphs. The title: ‘Harnessing Synergistic Potential.’ I have the audio muted. Of course I do. In another window, my actual work is happening-a flurry of emails, a spreadsheet that demands careful attention, a problem that requires genuine thought.

This window, the one with the progress bar, is a tax. It’s a compliance purgatory I must pass through to prove I have been… trained. The module itself feels like it was designed by a committee that had never met a human being but had read a pamphlet about them. It uses words like ‘leverage’ and ‘optimization’ as if they are physical objects. It asks me multiple-choice questions where the wrong answers are so absurd they feel like a form of mockery. It’s an insult wrapped in bad graphic design, and someone, somewhere, approved a budget for it that probably ended in a 9.

The Cost of an Illusion

There’s this pervasive belief that completing a course equals acquiring a skill. That witnessing a series of bullet points somehow rewires your brain. But it doesn’t. It teaches you one thing and one thing only: how to efficiently click ‘Next’ while appearing to pay attention. It trains you in the art of feigned engagement. I spent the better part of a decade arguing this was a necessary evil. I even defended it. I used to tell younger colleagues that it was just a hoop to jump through, a corporate ritual with no deeper meaning. That was a mistake. I was wrong to be so passive.

It treats employees like identical units on an assembly line, each requiring the same standardized bolt of information tightened to the same torque. It’s a system built on the assumption that we are all empty vessels, and that pouring in 49 slides of jargon will somehow make us full. The sheer, unadulterated arrogance of it is stunning when you stop and actually consider it. The process is the point, not the outcome.

A Past Confession and a Flawed System

I confess, my frustration is colored by a past life. For 9 months, I was on the other side of the screen. I helped build these things. I was a ‘Learning & Development Content Strategist.’ I wrote the scripts. I picked out the royalty-free music that sounds like a dentist’s office trying to be a nightclub. I made a fire safety module so generic it could have applied to an underwater research station or a desert outpost. My single proudest moment was creating a branching scenario, which I thought was revolutionary. It cost the client an extra $9,799. I saw the data later. 99% of users just clicked the first option on every screen to get to the end faster.

The Art of Real Learning

That whole experience left a bitter taste. A few years ago, trying to wash it out, I signed up for a local workshop. It was an impulse, a nine-hour session on a Saturday about creating complex origami. The instructor, Flora J.-P., was a woman in her late sixties with hands that moved with the unsettling precision of a surgeon. She didn’t have a PowerPoint. She had a stack of crisp, colored paper. Her only ‘visual aid’ was a finished model of a dragon, intricate and delicate, that sat on her desk. For the first hour, we just folded paper in half. Over and over. Learning the feel of it, the way to make a crease so sharp it could cut. She walked around the room, not speaking, just watching. She’d occasionally stop, take your piece of paper, and with two or three deft movements, correct a fold that was off by a millimeter. She was transferring a physical reality, a tactile understanding, from her hands to ours.

It took us 239 minutes just to build the base. There was no certificate at the end. No digital badge for my LinkedIn profile. But I left with a small, imperfectly folded crane in my pocket and a tangible skill in my mind.

Wallpaper or Story?

This obsession with scalable, one-size-fits-all solutions is where the corporate world gets it so wrong. We are told to personalize our customer outreach, to tailor our products, to find our niche. Yet internally, we are treated as the most generic audience imaginable. The walls of our offices are adorned with identical, soul-crushing motivational posters about teamwork, when what we might actually find inspiring is something personal. It’s the difference between a stock photo of a mountain and a detailed 3D wooden map of the city where you grew up. One is a bland, universal symbol; the other is a universe of personal meaning, encoded with memory and specificity. One is wallpaper; the other is a story.

Corporate training is wallpaper. It’s there to cover the cracks, to present a uniform surface, to ensure that, from a distance, everything looks vaguely professional. The lie we tell ourselves is that it’s for our benefit. But it’s for the benefit of the org chart, for the legal department, for the executive who can stand up at the all-hands meeting and announce that ‘99% of our staff are now certified in Synergistic Potential.’ It’s a performance. We click ‘Next,’ and they check a box.