Important but not urgent: exploring e-learning at work

Corporate e-learning has become a cornerstone of organisational strategy since the early 2000s, a trend accelerated by recent shifts towards remote and hybrid work arrangements (Kaur et al., 2020). Within human resource (HR) management, digital learning technologies have gained further momentum through algorithmic management and people analytics, which enable personalised learning paths and systematic data collection to monitor professional development (Caligiuri et al., 2020). In the context of digital transformation, continuous employee training is considered essential. It is viewed as a “central corporate optimisation strategy to respond to changes in the corporate environment” (Gerhards and Krause, 2021, p. 1, author’s translation), and as a means to align individual learning with organisational objectives and performance metrics, particularly in knowledge-intensive sectors.

Digital and AI technologies play a dual role in this process: they simultaneously drive the need for continuous learning and provide the infrastructure, such as learning platforms and virtual seminars, through which it is realised (Billett, 2021). However, the normalisation of remote work and home-based learning also introduces significant challenges for employees. Research indicates that these arrangements often involve a reconfiguration of work tasks and processes (Schreyer et al., 2023; Waizenegger et al., 2023), blur the boundaries between work and private life (Alfano et al., 2024; Brandt and Suess, 2025; Sundermeyer, 2025) and are frequently implemented with limited critical reflection on their broader implications for employees (Carroll and Conboy, 2020).

Against this background, attention shifts to the question of how workplace learning unfolds within digitally mediated work environments. As existing research shows, teaching and learning on platforms such as Zoom involve a substantial amount of hidden work, including the often invisible labour of maintaining digital infrastructures, reshaping pedagogical practices and sustaining interactional presence (Klein and Watson-Manheim, 2021; Watermeyer et al., 2021). Although a wide range of terms is now used to describe digital education (cf. Nordmann et al., 2025), scholars have repeatedly noted that the concrete learning process and the simultaneous reconfiguration of technologies, practices and contexts including work, education and home, remain under-examined and under-theorised (Tynjälä & Häkkinen, 2005, pp. 318–319). Moreover, corporate e-learning is frequently driven more by what technology can enable than by pedagogical principles (Selwyn, 2016; Servage, 2005). As a result, the literature is dominated by quantitative studies that focus on learning outcomes, user satisfaction or platform efficiency, while treating learning platforms as neutral delivery mechanisms (Banerjee, 2022; Creutz and Wiklund, 2014; Giannakos et al., 2022).

To address this gap, this paper adopts a sociomaterial perspective to examine how employees interpret, engage with and integrate e-learning into their everyday work. Drawing on semi-structured interviews, the study explores how employees enact a corporate e-learning platform within the broader organisational narrative of becoming a “learning organisation,” and how these enactments both enable and constrain workplace learning and professional development. The paper is structured as follows: the next section situates e-learning within the corporate context and presents the study’s theoretical framework. This is followed by a methodology section describing the qualitative approach adopted. The findings are presented across three thematic areas and discussed, with theoretical, methodological and practical implications addressed afterward.

E-learning remains a contested and evolving concept. Servage highlights that it is “a confused and confusing field, fragmented into multiple disciplines and emphases” (2005, p. 306), largely driven by technological development. Definitions often prioritise the role of information and communication technologies (ICT) over pedagogical elements like instructional design, learning objectives or evaluation. For instance, Welsh et al. define e-learning as “the use of computer network technology, primarily over an intranet or through the Internet, to deliver information and instruction to individuals” (2003, p. 246), reflecting a focus on functional effectiveness rather than on learning processes or outcomes.

In corporate contexts, e-learning is frequently positioned as a strategic instrument in human resource development (HRD) to support knowledge management and enable both individual and organisational learning (Wang, 2018, p. 17). Its promise of learning “at any time, in any place” (Garavan et al., 2002, p. 62) aligns with adult learning principles emphasising autonomy and self-direction (Knowles et al., 2005; Smith, 2003). However, this framing has become dominant, positioning employees as self-directed consumers of learning content and shifting responsibility from organisations to individuals. While flexibility is celebrated, many platforms presuppose levels of digital literacy and self-regulation that are unevenly distributed among employees, which can result in disengagement or limited learning outcomes (Ang et al., 2018, p. 89; Nagy, 2005, p. 80).

This emphasis on individualised, measurable and goal-oriented learning reflects a behaviourist influence, privileging predefined competencies aligned with performance metrics and often prioritising technological and economic efficiency. Servage (2005, p. 309) critiques this orientation for promoting fragmented and short-term understandings of learning that prioritise quantifiable outcomes over reflective and collaborative processes. More recent work suggests that digital automation and data-driven learning systems further reinforce managerial logics of control and standardisation, often at the expense of pedagogical depth and human-centred learning (Selwyn et al., 2023).

Despite growing interest in digital learning, most empirical studies on e-learning focus on educational settings, such as higher education or massive open online courses (MOOCs) (Ali et al., 2024; Johnson et al., 2023; Littlejohn et al., 2016), while corporate learning environments remain comparatively under-explored (Giannakos et al., 2022, p. 624). Also, research in this area continues to be dominated by acceptance factors, completion rates, usage data or learning analytics (Lantu et al., 2023; Lee et al., 2013; Moradi et al., 2018; Zhang et al., 2019). Only a small number of studies examine how employees experience and make sense of e-learning within their everyday work and organisational contexts (Hult and Byström, 2022; Ifenthaler, 2018a). Accordingly, we still know relatively little about how corporate e-learning platforms are interpreted and used in practice.

In response to these limitations, scholarship in organisation and management studies – particularly informed by socio-cultural and practice-based theories – conceptualises workplace learning as socially situated and shaped by prior experience, routines and evolving domains of expertise (Akella, 2010; Illeris, 2003). From this perspective, workplace learning emerges through participation in everyday work practices and social interaction rather than exclusively through the acquisition of discrete skills (Brown and Duguid, 1991; Gherardi, 2012; Lave and Wenger, 1991). This theoretical lens provides a foundation for the analytical perspective adopted in the present study, which I introduce in the following section.

This study draws on sociomaterial perspectives from Science and Technology Studies (STS), which provide a nuanced understanding of how technologies are interpreted and used in specific work contexts (Mol, 2002; Orlikowski, 2007; Suchman, 2005). Sociomaterial approaches emphasise that work practices are always situated accomplishments, shaped through concrete activities and interactions (Knoblauch and Heath, 1999; Luff et al., 2000; Schönian, 2022, p. 26). This body of research argues that the social and the technological are not separate spheres, but mutually constitutive. Orlikowski (2007) describes how humans and artefacts are recursively and relationally engaged – that is, “entangled” – thereby co-producing meanings as part of practices. Following Orlikowski, Wajcman and Rose (2011, p. 943) stress that when it comes to a sociomaterial lens:

This perspective shifts attention away from viewing technology as a stable context for human agency towards understanding technology and human action, and their identifiable boundaries, as enacted in everyday work. Such a performative understanding rests on the notion of enactment which describes how technology is brought into being in practice (Mol, 2002, p. 32; Hultin, 2019, p. 93). Agency is thus distributed across sociomaterial configurations of human actors, artefacts and organisational structures, which can be studied by examining the practices in which both the platform and employees participate (Moura and Bispo, 2020, p. 355; Latour, 2005; Suchman, 2012).

The study thus investigates how platform functionalities are enacted in everyday work, materialising through situated practices rather than existing as a separate, virtual realm (Schönian, 2011) and how these enactments can enable or constrain workplace learning. A sociomaterial analysis also accounts for the broader organisational context, including work culture, norms and rules, as well as how employees interpret their roles, which is central to understanding how the platform is embedded in professional practice.

Guided by this understanding, learning in the workplace is not an isolated individual process but emerges through the ongoing entanglement of human and material agencies, making certain practices recognisable as “learning” (Fenwick et al., 2015; Sørensen, 2009). This perspective enables a process-oriented and relational analysis of workplace learning, showing how learning unfolds through configurations of social relations, technologies and organisational structures. It aligns with constructivist perspectives that view learning as collaborative, socially situated and interactive (Wang, 2018, p. 18; see also Illeris, 2003). Such a lens may illuminate the potentially ambivalent role of the learning platform – how it can simultaneously enable and constrain learning, reflecting both managerial and local work logics and potentially reconfiguring power relations, managerial control and organisational hierarchies (Meyer et al., 2019; Miele and Tirabeni, 2020; Schönian, 2024).

Against this theoretical backdrop, the study investigates how employees make sense of and engage with the learning platform in their daily work. By foregrounding its sociomaterial configuration, the analysis moves beyond instrumental accounts of technology use, offering a qualitative understanding of how corporate learning through digital technologies is enacted and made meaningful in organisational contexts.

This study is part of a broader project examining the implementation and use of digital technologies in corporate change management, with e-learning platforms emerging as a key focus within current organisational transformation initiatives. Grounded in constructivist and sociomaterial perspectives, this research used a qualitative, interpretive design to explore how employees enact the e-learning platform in their everyday work. Qualitative methods enable rich insights into how technologies are used and made sense of within specific organisational contexts (Denzin and Lincoln, 2017). Consistent with this interpretive stance, the empirical data were understood as co-constructed through interactions between participants and researcher and analysed iteratively to capture evolving meanings. The aim was to generate rich, contextualised insights into how the platform becomes entangled with work practices, learning processes and broader organisational dynamics (Yanow and Schwartz-Shea, 2015).

The empirical focus was on “I-Learn”, an e-learning platform embedded in the HRD strategy of an international high-tech conglomerate headquartered in Germany. Operating in industrial automation, transportation and healthcare-related technologies, the company faces continuous pressure to remain competitive in a rapidly digitalising sector, making the platform central to its learning and professional development strategy. The company positions itself as a “learning organisation”, encouraging employees to take responsibility for their development and to foster adaptability and digital readiness.

The platform functions as a learning management system (LMS) designed to support self-directed learning and knowledge integration across the organisation. Its combines a central content management system with AI-driven recommendation, learning modules and activity-tracking features (cf. Giannakos et al., 2022, p. 621). At the time of the study, the platform was integrated into the corporate intranet, where a learning widget displayed each employee’s accumulated learning hours for the year alongside the company-wide average, highlighting any deviations. Although the widget can be turned off, none of the participants in this study had chosen to do so. A link labelled “Learn and develop further” provided direct access to the platform’s main page.

Oversight and content management were coordinated by the HR department, which curated and integrated learning materials, while specialist departments could appoint curators to tailor resources to their operational needs. Employees may access both internally curated content and a large external library of a commercial learning vendor. Although the company organised a designated “learning week” with structured sessions, employees largely decided when and how to engage with the platform, reflecting the organisation’s broader emphasis on self-directed learning.

Key characteristics relevant to this study included personalised learning pathways, automated progress tracking and a dashboard summarising all courses and learning activities completed. These features become entangled with temporal pressures, work expectations, HR programs and employees’ professional development, shaping how the platform, organisational structures and work routines constitute workplace learning.

To explore how employees engage with the e-learning platform, I conducted 17 semi-structured interviews with 18 participants from various departments across the organisation. All interviewees were engaged in knowledge work (KW), including roles in marketing communications, technical specialist functions and organisational development. Three participants were from the HR department, and five were members of the company’s works council. Initial access was facilitated through the company’s women’s network, from there access expanded organically through collegial referrals, following a snowball logic typical of qualitative inquiry (Noy, 2008). Participants provided informed consent, signing a document that outlined the purpose of the project, the interview procedures and their right to withdraw at any stage. Participants were recruited until thematic saturation was reached, meaning that further interviews largely repeated insights already captured and no substantially new themes emerged.

The interviews were conducted between January 2023 and April 2025, with most held virtually, reflecting both the geographical distribution of employees and broader shifts towards hybrid and remote work structures. This format proved more accessible and less disruptive to employees though it also raised specific methodological considerations. Digital interview settings shape trust-building, narrative flow and the interpretation of non-verbal cues and can be understood as sociomaterial and performative arrangements shaped by the interplay of technologies, spatial environments and discursive practices (Hultin, 2019; Nicklich et al., 2023; Raible et al., 2023). In this sense, the interview itself constitutes an “empirical situation” (Langley et al., 2012, p. 143) through which relations between work, technology and learning become (partly) observable (cf. Schönian, 2022, p. 71).

I took notes during and after each interview session, capturing preliminary observations, striking statements and emerging patterns. While interviews initially explored a broad range of digital technologies involved in the company’s transformation initiatives, the e-learning platform and a survey-based monitoring instrument emerged as central and strategically significant. Conversations increasingly focused on how employees engaged with them in their everyday work. For the e-learning platform in particular, participants shared their screens and allowed screenshots, grounding the discussion in concrete, observable practices. Interviews examined whether and how engagement with the platform contributed to professional development within the organisation’s aim of becoming a “learning organisation.” The study focused on three interconnected areas: employees’ everyday use the platform; how features such as learning-hour tracking and algorithmic recommendations supported or constrained these engagements; and how organisational routines, HR programs and managerial roles shaped platform use and professional development.

While interviews typically began with participants describing their work and expertise, they soon interacted with the platform itself. This direct engagement with the platform shaped the sociomaterial situation of the interview. HR personnel and works council members often occupied dual roles, both reflecting on the platform as part of organisational strategy and engaging with it as users. Interviews therefore combined reflective discussion with in-situ demonstration, as participants navigated and referred to the platform while describing their practices, responsibilities and decisions. This approach captured how employees enact and make sense of the platform in practice and how these enactments intersect with the company’s strategic goals.

All interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim by a professional transcription agency. I analysed all transcripts and interview notes using reflexive thematic analysis, consistent with the study’s constructivist and interpretive orientation (Braun and Clarke, 2021; Nowell et al., 2017). Themes were understood as patterns of meaning actively constructed through the engagement with participants’ accounts. Interview notes complemented the transcripts and supported initial reflexive sensemaking and theme development.

I read the transcripts repeatedly, marking passages of interest and attending to recurring references to platform engagement, perceived capabilities and constraints and the integration (or lack) of learning into everyday work routines. Particular attention was paid to how participants described their experiences as individual users and in their organisational roles, such as HR personnel or works council members.

The materials were coded and organised using MAXQDA, with student assistants supporting the initial analysis. I then grouped passages by topic and provisional themes, such as temporal pressures shaping engagement and the relationship between platform features and organisational routines. For example, one employee explained, “[…] of course, online learning always gets pushed to the back,” illustrating how learning was often subordinated to everyday work demands. Another noted, “I usually do it [online learning] after work. If it’s something I really need for my job, then maybe I’ll squeeze it in during an afternoon while working from home.” These accounts illustrate the theme of selective engagement under time constraints, which emerged as a central analytical focus. Codes and themes were iteratively refined, through continuous comparison with both the data and theoretical concepts described above.

Screenshots shared during interviews complemented the transcripts and notes, providing contextual reference points for understanding how platform features were interpreted and enacted in practice. I also discussed emerging findings with colleagues involved in a parallel study within the broader research project (Brechtelsbauer and Laumer, 2024), supporting reflexive interrogation and comparative insights. This abductive process enabled a nuanced understanding of platform enactment, highlighting the complexity and ambivalence of digital learning at work.

The platform offers both mandatory and optional learning content. At the time of the study, required modules, such as compliance and cybersecurity, were still managed through a separate system overseen by another department, though plans existed to consolidate them into I-Learn. The integration of an external library expanded the platform to over 100,000 learning resources in formats ranging from videos and podcasts to virtual workshops. Designated curators regularly reviewed content to ensure quality and appropriate categorisation. Despite these efforts, employees frequently reported feeling overwhelmed by the volume of material available: “The problem for us now is that there’s so much available, people can’t find their way around anymore” (Manger KW), capturing how abundance itself became a barrier to engagement. Referring to its recommendation system, another employee described the platform as “similar to when you look at shoes on Amazon”, emphasising the logic of algorithmic recommendations. This paradox of increasing content availability coinciding with reduced engagement was not incidental but emergent from the platform’s material design. Therefore, rather than navigating content individually, employees increasingly relied on peer recommendations within teams to identify relevant learning resources. In this manner, the platform’s capacity to aggregate and display vast content, combined with peer recommendation, performed a collectively mediated version of “learning”. Learning thus shifted from individual exploration towards socially coordinated selection practices that emerged in response to overload.

Alongside content abundance, the prominent display of accumulated learning hours significantly shaped how learning was understood. To recall, learning hours were visible on the corporate intranet homepage and compared against a company-wide average, prompting many employees to justify why they fell below this benchmark. The visibility of the metric and its associated categorisation was highlighted by works council members who emphasised that lower record hours could lead to employees being labelled as “low performers”. Yet the metric produced contradictory effects. One works council member explained:

In this statement, learning hours are described as hollow indicators that prioritise visibility over substance. The metric’s material form, its visibility and quantifiability, enables a specific organisational logic in which learning becomes legible as a comparable performance. In doing so, it functions as a control instrument that classifies and disciplines employees through constant visibility, even without explicit managerial intervention. This logic ultimately strips learning of its qualitative meaning. Works council members further noted that the metric primarily serves to present the board in a favourable light, rather than fostering substantive learning, and that opinions remain divided on its value for guiding employee development.

Adding to this ambiguity, a wide range of loosely defined activities are counted as learning time, from brief microlearning units to internally designated project meetings. As one employee noted, when credit is awarded “for every little thing”, attention shifts towards accumulating hours rather than meaningful development. In fact, this expansion produced contradictory classifications:

As this shows, the platform’s capacity to track and display learning hours produces ambiguity rather than clarity. Combined with the abundance of available content, learning becomes reduced to a visible and comparable metric, often detached from its substantive meaning. This gives rise to contradictory interpretations: high engagement may be read as superficial or inefficient, while low engagement can be interpreted as a lack of initiative. What counts as meaningful learning is therefore not fixed but enacted differently across contexts. The platform materialises this ambiguity as a classification problem employees must navigate, while simultaneously participating in organisational control by making learning hours continuously visible, comparable and open to judgement.

The platform’s technical capacity to record activities further complicates this dynamic. Both online and offline learning, including workshops and in-person sessions, can be logged. In fact, this technical flexibility masks unresolved questions about what counts as learning and, crucially, what counts as working time. One employee described this tension in relation to self-organised job shadowing:

Although the activity could be recorded, it remains categorically suspended: recognised as learning but denied recognition as work. The platform materialises the boundary between work and learning as a technical classification, while the organisation leaves this boundary insufficiently defined and thus contested. Rather than resolving uncertainty, recording produces greater ambiguity, requiring employees to navigate contradictory organisational logics through the platform’s material architecture.

Even when learning activities are technically logged, employees described a persistent tension between the platform’s potential and everyday work demands. One employee described this approach as “hypocritical” and drew a contrast between learning and “productive” work:

This sentiment reflects the subordinate status of learning compared to operational work. Despite presenting itself as a “learning organisation”, the company apparently does not acknowledge learning as work. The same employee emphasised that being too active on the platform could even signal a lack of productivity:

Apparently, learning is not only perceived as separate from work but is also seen as less valuable. Another employee noted that a sense of urgency exists only in relation to work tasks:

The company’s strategic orientation clearly positions learning as important; however, in everyday work, it lacks the same urgency as operational tasks. One works council member highlighted this contradiction:

As can be seen, learning does not seem to be regarded as a genuine part of work – it is, so to speak, the ‘other’ of work. Another material feature of the platform – its flexibility in allowing learning to take place anytime and anywhere – does not necessarily challenge this perception and may even reinforce it. One employee (KW 6) emphasised, “online learning always gets pushed to the back […] even the mandatory courses are postponed until the very last minute”, illustrating again how learning is subordinated to work. Employees also noted that even when they block time slots during the week, they often postpone their learning. This temporal negotiation of learning reflects the interplay between employees’ schedules, platform features and organisational routines. One manager described how he integrates digital learning sessions into his work schedule:

Again, this framing suggests that learning is something to be fit in when nothing more pressing occurs, such as post-lunch, even though concentration is supposedly lower at that time. The organisation subtly shapes learning behaviour by signalling which times and formats are acceptable, exerting indirect control. These logics further underscore the subordinate role assigned to learning. Another employee, when asked when learning on the platform happens, responded:

This description highlights a preference for learning at home. Thus, learning via the platform becomes reconfigured as an activity predominantly happening at home. The notion of urgency surfaces again: she only “squeezes in” learning when a job task demands it. But her account points to another characteristic of the platform – its content spans both professional and personal interests. As quoted above, employees can explore topics related to psychology and well-being or take language courses. This dual orientation links some content to personal development rather than work, reinforcing its ambivalent character. It thereby mediates both autonomy and organisational priorities, allowing personal exploration while remaining tied to work-related expectations.

Employees make use of this dual orientation in the context of their personal interests, as already indicated in the previous quote and outlined by this employee:

This statement illustrates how low-threshold access enables engagement with personally meaningful content. The remark that she “just wish[es]… [she] had more time for it” signals a structural constraint: the persistent lack of time limits actual engagement. This tension between possibility and practicality exemplifies the ambivalence evident across employees’ experiences. While the platform facilitates access and supports greater autonomy, it does not resolve the underlying question of when learning should occur. This dilemma becomes even more apparent in light of one works council member’s comment “the company doesn’t want that [learning from home]. The company says, go ahead and do that during your working hours.” Yet in practice, finding time during the workday often proves intricate, leaving employees to determine when and how to engage with learning, and thus to self-manage their engagement.

Another example of autonomy came from an employee using learning videos to manage stress: “For me, it’s actually a way to regulate stress”, blurring the boundary between professional development and personal well-being. She emphasised that these experiences are individual: while digital learning works as a coping mechanism for her, “for other people, it’s not like that.” This highlights the role of self-regulation and personal responsibility in shaping learning practices. The platform’s easy access interacts with individual agency, enabling but also demanding employees to manage their learning within organisational structures. Thus, while the platform supports autonomy, without structural support, integrating learning largely falls to employees, reflecting a subtle form of organisational control through expectations of self-management.

As already indicated, the learning platform is strategically embedded within the company’s HR development program, where it plays a central role. As the head of the HR department explained:

He further elaborated that “self-reflection” involves tools such as initiating a structured feedback process to prepare for so-called “development talks” or using an application that helps employees identify strengths and align them with current or potential future roles. Asked about the learning platform, he highlighted both its extensive content and personalised learning paths:

This framing foregrounds the platform’s technical functionalities while attributing failure to employees and overlooks contextual factors that shape engagement. In fact, all employees expressed a strong sense of personal commitment to their learning and development, yet responsibility is shifted onto the individual, reducing systemic challenges to personal shortcomings. In this manner, technology-mediated learning increases organisational control, granting autonomy conditional upon self-management, self-discipline and alignment with organisational goals. In contrast to the head of HR, a member of the works council offered a more critical yet nuanced perspective:

This highlights another fundamental ambivalence: strategic commitment to learning exists, yet the process lacks structural anchoring and oversight – deliberately so, according to the works council. Excluding the council signals a preference for flexibility over formalisation, suggesting initiatives are framed more as individual responsibility than as collectively organised workforce development.

As described above by the head of HR, the core of initiatives centres on regular conversations (“development talks”) between employees and managers. However, not all managers seemed to share the view that learning is a vital part of employees’ professional development, as already suggested in the quote from the works council member earlier. Echoing this concern, the head of HR critically remarked:

Apparently, contrary to the company’s official stance, management does not consistently support employees’ learning activities, as was already evident in relation to the subordination of learning to work. But this statement highlights the role of managers in the context of the learning platform. When asked why employees find the platform difficult to use, one employee emphasised that managers play a key role:

This statement shows that corporate workplace learning is a complex endeavour, with managers central to supporting employees’ learning and professional development. These accounts illuminate the constitutive sociomaterial entanglement between managers’ actions, platform features and HR routines that are inseparably intertwined in shaping how learning through the platform is enacted.

One employee illustrated this dynamic by explaining that it often comes down to a conversation with her manager to identify upcoming tasks and jointly select suitable training. As she underlined, the platform works well for specific learning needs, but browsing without a clear objective is rather unproductive. This highlights the importance of having a concrete learning purpose – often shaped in dialogue with a manager – to make effective use of the available resources. Regarding the designated development talks, one works council member stated that these conversations often do not take place as intended, or are conducted in a rather superficial manner, limiting their potential to support employees’ development:

She later noted in the interview, that she had not had a single one of these talks with her manager in the past three years. This emphasises a key tension: learning via the platform depends not only on individual initiative and the ability to integrate it into the workday, but also on a central HR element that now hinges on employees taking the lead. Conversations once held regularly and formally documented are now relaxed and shifted onto employees. Echoing concerns raised by another works council member, she highlighted the lack of transparency regarding future job openings and guidance on aligning personal development. This shift demonstrates how organisational responsibility for workforce development is being redistributed downward, fostering self-monitoring and accountability that tend to place the burden of career progression on the individual.

As can be seen, employees’ broader professional development relies not only on their initiative but also on direct managers’ involvement. Despite being technically up to date, the platform must be embedded within ongoing dialogue about job roles and career paths to be truly effective. Taken together, these findings indicate that the I-Learn platform is not a neutral artefact but is materially and socially enacted, with multiple realities emerging from the interplay of employees, technology and organisational structures.

Learning platforms are often framed as cost-effective, flexible tools that integrate seamlessly into workplace routines and empower employees through anytime access to personalised content (Ifenthaler, 2018b). Yet research on e-learning in corporate contexts remains limited, and the findings of this study reveal a more ambivalent reality. The ambition to become a “learning organisation” through a digital learning platform proves to be an intricate and contested endeavour, shaped by tensions between learning and work, autonomy and control and flexibility and responsibility.

Adopting a sociomaterial perspective, this study moves beyond evaluations of e-learning based on uptake rates or behavioural indicators. The platform’s material properties become entangled with organisational routines, temporal constraints and managerial practices, shaping everyday enactments of learning. What counts as learning is continuously configured through these sociomaterial relations, so that employee autonomy, responsibility and organisational control are co-constituted rather than residing in individuals or technologies alone.

The platform generates multiple and sometimes contradictory demands. The abundance of content complicates navigation and relevance, prompting reliance on peer recommendations and managerial guidance. Moreover, visibility of learning hours introduces ambivalence: low engagement may be interpreted as a lack of initiative, while high engagement can signal time taken away from core tasks. Learning is thus technically measurable but organisationally unsettled, reinforcing its subordinate status relative to everyday work priorities.

The metrics and datafication of learning constitute a broader logic of visibility and control. This “trace data” records engagement and activities, thus making learning knowable, comparable and open to judgement (Aaltonen and Stelmaszak, 2024). Metrics function as “informating” technologies (Zuboff, 1989, p. 10), increasing transparency while simultaneously intensifying surveillance. Even without advanced analytics, visibility prompts employees to self-calibrate in anticipation of organisational evaluation, aligning with research on algorithmic and data-driven organisational control (Kellogg et al., 2020; Noponen et al., 2024; Schreyer, 2024; Zhang et al., 2025). Learning becomes less about content engagement and more about managing one’s position within the metric, co-producing organisational control and learning practices rather than merely recording behaviour.

Learning practices shaped by metrics and self-calibration remain only partially integrated into everyday work. Despite official encouragement to learn during working hours, time pressures often push learning into employees’ personal time. The promise of “anytime, anywhere” access contributes to diffused responsibility and reinforces the individualisation of professional development. This finding resonates with prior research on digital work, showing how flexibility and autonomy coexist with heightened self-management expectations (Ang et al., 2018; Hult and Byström, 2022).

At the same time, the platform’s low-threshold access expands opportunities for exploratory and self-directed learning. This dual character underscores its ambivalence: while enabling autonomy, it leaves relevance, timing and prioritisation largely to employees. Responsibility is thus delegated downward, and organisational accountability for supporting meaningful development remains minimal, reflecting shifts in corporate education towards efficiency, standardisation and measurable outputs (Nicklich, 2025).

Managers emerged as key mediators. Unlike algorithmic recommendation generated by the platform, managers can situate learning in relation to concrete roles, tasks and career trajectories. However, regular development talks (formally central to HR strategy) occur inconsistently and often only at employees’ initiative. HR interpretations of employee engagement focused narrowly on the platform’s technical functionality and on whether employees used it as prescribed, rather than on its meaningful integration into everyday work. This limited understanding reinforces the individualisation of learning responsibilities and illustrates the gap between HR expectations and employees’ lived experiences, illustrating the importance of managerial involvement in contextualising learning and bridging strategic goals with individual professional development (Hult and Byström, 2022).

Employees’ professional development remains tentative, as broader organisational conditions to support it are underdeveloped. This highlights that, as with AI systems more generally, the effects of digital technologies are contingent on organisational structures and work practices (Herrmann and Pfeiffer, 2023). Moreover, learning metrics are meaningful only when grounded in a shared understanding of what is to be learned, why and in relation to specific work tasks. Works council members noted that strategic communication around workforce development remained opaque, particularly in times of economic uncertainty. These insights illustrate the relational configuration of learning and underscore the practical limitations of relying solely on digital platforms.

Taken together, the findings show that the platform is not a neutral instrument: it shapes what learning becomes, how it is valued and whose responsibility it is. Learning metrics act as central actors in redistributing responsibility and extending subtle forms of organisational control, highlighting the interplay of technology, employee practices and organisational routines.

This study contributes to sociomateriality research by empirically demonstrating how digital platforms actively participate in configuring organisational realities. Rather than treating learning technologies as mediators of pre-defined organisational routines, the analysis shows how the platform co-produces learning, employee autonomy and organisational control. In doing so, the study advances sociomaterial debates by providing empirical evidence in which learning platforms emerge as sites where organisational values, temporal regimes and accountability structures are materially enacted.

For research on workplace learning and corporate e-learning, the study challenges dominant evaluative frameworks centred on participation rates, completion metrics or behavioural outcomes. By showing how learning is enacted through sociomaterial configurations, the findings highlight that learning metrics cannot be interpreted independently of organisational routines, managerial involvement and everyday work constraints. This demonstrates how digital learning infrastructures simultaneously enable and delimit learning, producing multiple realities of engagement.

Methodologically, the study illustrates the value of qualitative, interpretive approaches for examining platformised learning. Interviews combined with participants’ demonstrations of platform use made it possible to trace how employees interpret metrics, navigate ambiguity and adjust their practices in relation to organisational expectations. Such methods capture the performative effects of digital technologies often obscured in quantitative analyses.

This approach also highlights avenues for methodological expansion. For example, direct workplace observation could offer further insight into how learning activities are integrated into everyday work routines. In addition, while this study focuses on employee enactment, further methods could investigate the kinds of knowledge the platform configures and its alignment with professional tasks.

For organisations, the findings underscore that digital learning platforms cannot substitute for organisational support. Metrics and monitoring mechanisms may inadvertently intensify disciplinary pressures if learning remains weakly integrated into everyday work. Designing learning infrastructures that balance flexibility with structural support, such as protected learning time and consistent managerial involvement, is essential.

Managers play a critical role in contextualising learning and linking platform offerings to roles and career paths. Without such involvement, responsibility for professional development is shifted downward, reinforcing self-monitoring and individual accountability. For HR practitioners, the study highlights the limits of relying on uptake metrics alone and calls for greater attention to how learning is enacted and valued in practice.

This study demonstrates that corporate learning platforms are more than neutral tools for delivering content. They actively shape what counts as learning, how it is enacted and the responsibilities associated with it. Employees navigate these platforms in relation to organisational expectations, work priorities and algorithmically mediated metrics, highlighting the entanglement of autonomy, control and digital infrastructure.

By foregrounding the relational and performative aspects of platformised learning, the study underscores that meaningful professional development emerges from the interweaving of technological capabilities, managerial guidance and everyday work practices. Platforms provide opportunities for self-directed learning, but their effects are inseparable from the organisational contexts in which they are embedded.

The author gratefully acknowledges the anonymous company and its employees for their willingness to participate in this study. The author also thanks the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and valuable suggestions. The author further thanks Bastian Brechtelsbauer for his feedback on earlier versions of this article, and Romy Blinzler and Anne Müller for their support in developing the coding scheme.