Each quarter, someone reserves a conference room, orders some food, and creates a calendar reminder titled "Leadership Skills Workshop - MANDATORY." At least 50% of those invited arrive late. A small number of the invitees spend their time on their phones during the workshop. By the following Friday, the majority of what was taught has left their minds. The format was responsible for this, not the individuals participating in the training.
Training within an organization has been designed for decades with one underlying belief: that the best way to learn is to bring a large group of people together into one room for a predetermined length of time to learn together. This was true when companies were more predictable; it was true when team members worked out of the same building, worked under similar timeframes, and advanced in their careers at approximately equal rates.
Remote and hybrid work broke the shared calendar. Skills now age faster, so a one-day workshop on data literacy in January can feel outdated by June. And most company workforces are more fragmented than they were ten years ago: full-time employees, contractors, and senior staff who need depth in specific areas.
On-demand academies address this directly. Instead of a single scheduled event, companies build a library of short, structured learning modules that employees access when they need them, at their own pace. The companies building on-demand academies aren't primarily doing it to cut costs - they're doing it because the workshop calendar stopped producing results.
What Broke the Workshop Model
The problems with internal workshops aren't new. L&D teams have known about them for years. The difference now is that the cost of ignoring them has become harder to justify.
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Scheduling kills attendance before training begins. When you want to put everybody in one place (so 20 people in a room), you need to coordinate the date across teams, time zones, and project deliverables. By the time the meeting actually happens, not all the participants will be physically and mentally there: they will have other work to do, always be dealing with urgent emails, and wondering why they postponed the meeting so that they could attend this one. Studies from the learning research firm SHRM put average post-training knowledge retention at roughly 10% after a week without reinforcement. A day-long workshop, however well-designed, faces that ceiling.
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The content is built for no one in particular. A single session covering communication skills or compliance procedures has to serve the new hire, the mid-career manager, and the senior specialist at the same time. Facilitators solve this by pitching to the middle, which means the content is too basic for some and too fast for others. The people who needed something specific leave with something general.
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One session doesn't build a skill. Watching someone demonstrate a negotiation technique or walk through a framework for giving feedback doesn't translate into doing it. Skill-building needs repetition, spaced over time, with chances to apply and correct. A three-hour block in March doesn't provide that. It provides exposure, which feels like training but produces different results.
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The cost per head is high for what gets retained. When considering facilitator fees, location, travel, and other associated costs and productivity lost from 15 to 20 people being away from their regular work site for the length of the workshop, costs can quickly become high. However, if the participant learns something from the program, and that knowledge is retained, these costs can be justified.
None of this means workshops are useless. The structural problem is using them as the primary vehicle for building skills across an organization - running them on a fixed schedule regardless of whether the format suits what's being taught.
What On-Demand Academies Actually Look Like
The term "Academy on Demand" is used inaccurately, so we need to state this clearly.
An academy on demand is a structured collection of learning content that organizes around roles, skills, and career stages, accessible at any time, at one's own pace, and designed to be completed in pieces rather than all at once. The most important detail is that it is structured content; for example, a folder of recorded webinars and a shared drive full of PDFs do not qualify as an academy.
Short modules
Academies generally have short modules of five-minute, 10-minute, or 15-minute learning content so employees can complete at least one module before a meeting and another during a slow period of their workday. Completion rates are higher for shorter modules than for longer ones (#48: one hour).
Role-specific tracks
Academies generally provide multiple learning tracks and separate curricula for various job functions. For example, the learning paths of a junior salesperson and a junior engineer differ, even though they may use the same platform; each individual's role determines what they see.
Embedded assessments
Mini-quizzes or exercises after each module require recall, reinforcing memory. These are not graded but serve as a benchmark for the employee and their manager to identify where their knowledge gaps still exist.
Blended content types
Different learning and content types are addressed through examples such as text, videos, and interactive scenarios. For example, a compliance module may use a text format; conversely, a module focused on feedback skills may be best modeled as a branching scenario in which an employee makes a choice and then observes the outcome of that choice.
Tips for companies that want to succeed
The following are some considerations when structuring your academy:
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Assign someone to own the academy. If no one owns it, it will become outdated and decay. Quarterly reviews will find outdated modules before employees use them.
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Connect learning to work. The best academies connect modules to specific time points, such as a new manager being placed into a people management track on their first day.
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Provide visibility of progress. Dashboards that show progress, completion, and skill gaps increase employee engagement with comparative content.
The structure of the academy is more important than the technology in place to support the academy. An organized academy basusing an inexpensive LMS will likely outperform a poorly organized academy basusing a costly LMS.
Where They Work Better (and Where They Don't)
On-demand academies get oversold. Vendors pitch them as a replacement for all instructor-led training, which isn't accurate and leaves companies with gaps they don't notice until something goes wrong.
On-demand works well for:
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Compliance and policy training. Content that needs to reach everyone, stays consistent, and requires a completion record is a natural fit. On-demand handles this cheaper and faster than scheduling company-wide sessions.
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Technical upskilling. Learning a new software tool, a coding language, or a data analysis method suits self-paced formats well. Employees move at the speed their existing knowledge allows, skip what they already know, and revisit what they don't.
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Onboarding. New hires need a lot of information in a short time, and much of it (company processes, product knowledge, systems access) doesn't require a facilitator. An onboarding academy frees managers from repeating the same orientation material and gives new hires something to return to after their first week.
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Ongoing reference. Employees forget things. An academy they can search and revisit is more useful than notes from a workshop they attended eight months ago.
Workshops still hold ground for:
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Leadership development. Learning to manage conflict, give difficult feedback, or navigate organizational politics requires live practice and real-time response. A branching scenario can approximate this, but a skilled facilitator working with a room of managers handles nuance that recorded content can't replicate.
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Team dynamics and culture work. Sessions designed to build trust, surface disagreements, or align a team on direction need the people in the room to be together. The shared experience is part of the outcome.
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Anything that requires coaching. Skills that develop through iteration and personalized feedback - public speaking, executive presence, complex negotiation - need a human in the loop. On-demand content can introduce the concepts, but a coach or facilitator does the actual development work.
The practical model most companies land on is a split: on-demand academies handle breadth, covering the skills that need to reach many people consistently. Workshops, now run less often and with clearer objectives, handle depth - the skills that require live interaction to develop properly.
How to Build One Without Starting From Scratch
Most L&D teams that successfully launch an on-demand academy don't build it from scratch. They reorganize what already exists, fill the gaps, and add structure. Starting with a blank platform and commissioning entirely new content is slow, expensive, and unnecessary.
Start with an audit
Before touching any platform, list what your organization already has: recorded training sessions, onboarding documents, process guides, internal wikis, and slide decks from past workshops. Most companies have more reusable material than they realize. The audit tells you what to convert, update, and discard.
A simple audit framework:
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Keep and convert: Accurate Content, specific to your company, and would benefit from being accessible anytime
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License and supplement: General skills content (communication, Excel, project management) that a provider already builds and updates
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Cut: Anything outdated, redundant, or too long to be useful in a modular format
Decide on the structure before choosing a platform.
You should sketch your role-specific tracks after the tools have all been identified. Use paper to document your structure before evaluating any tools. This will help you avoid letting platform features drive curriculum design, which many people do. A sales enablement track will look different than an engineering track, so be sure to outline the skills needed to perform that job and in what sequence they should be delivered.
For most companies, the platform shortlist narrows quickly based on three criteria: how well it integrates with existing HR systems, whether it supports both licensed and internally created content, and how much administration it requires to maintain.
Build in phases
A common mistake is launching an entire academy on day one. Instead, pick one track, build it well, and run a test group before adding tracks to the academy. This allows you to find structural issues before you replicate them across ten other tracks and provides a working example of what you want to show leadership when asking for more money.
Here’s how you can structure the phases realistically:
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Phase 1: Build and run a single track for a single job with real employees. Collect feedback on content gaps and usability.
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Phase 2: Using lessons learned from phase 1, expand to two or three adjacent jobs.
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Phase 3: Roll out the use of the academy for all jobs company-wide that have a content maintenance schedule in place.
Assign ownership with teeth
Without a named owner for the academy, it will become an abandoned library within one year of launch. The named owner must be responsible for performing quarterly content reviews, keeping track of which modules employees flag as out-of-date, and going to department heads about the need to update the job requirements when changes occur. The responsibility must be clearly defined and assigned to someone.
Connect enrollment to moments that matter
Unengaged people do not engage with libraries; engaged academies connect event triggers (i.e., promotion, new role, new project, performance review, identifying skill gap) to each employee's engagement in their education. Employees engage in learning only when they are triggered to do so.
Conclusion
Successful companies use course completion as a doorway, not an endpoint, and track employee skill application, as well as obtain manager observations at 30 days and 60 days after course completion. Learning data is then tied back to performance metrics to establish measurable cause-and-effect relationships.
An academy solves the scheduling problem. The behavior change part is still on you.