--- title: "Why employees can’t find the training they need (and what it costs)" date: 2026-08-17 author: "Courtney McCullers" featured_image: "https://www.panopto.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/healthcare-video-training.jpg" --- # Why employees can’t find the training they need (and what it costs) Most L&D teams invest substantially in employees. According to [new research from Training magazine and Panopto](https://www.panopto.com/resource/ebook/findability-gap-report/), a survey of more than 400 learning and development professionals found that organizations spend roughly $874 per employee per year on training and deliver about 40 hours of content per employee annually. But if employees aren’t finding what they need, there’s no ROI. This problem has a name: the findability gap. And closing it may be the highest-leverage move available to L&D leaders today. As Panopto COO Amy Clark put it in a [recent webinar](https://www.panopto.com/resource/webinar-on-demand/addressing-the-hidden-cost-findability-gap/): “We’re spending money on learning and training, but people aren’t actually using it.” ## The five aspects of the findability gap The research points to five structural breaks that reinforce one another, creating compounding friction across the organization. ### Investment Organizations are spending, but that spending doesn’t guarantee access. Money allocated to content creation, LMS platforms, and training hours doesn’t automatically translate into knowledge that employees can retrieve on demand. ### Adoption Video is now standard, used by 80 to 90% of organizations surveyed. But widespread adoption hasn’t solved the access problem. ### Storage [Our research shows](https://www.panopto.com/resource/ebook/findability-gap-report/) 74% of training content lives in the LMS. But it also lives in Teams recordings, Zoom calls, SharePoint folders, and department intranets, often without anyone’s explicit awareness. ### Behavior When employees need information, only 14% go to the LMS first. They go to the company intranet, a subject matter expert, Google, or ChatGPT. When people consistently route around your system, your investment is already losing value. ### Searchability Even when employees try to use the system, they often hit a wall. 68% of organizations report that most of their recorded video training is not searchable. Only 20% of L&D leaders are satisfied with their current video search capabilities. More than half say their content is effectively unsearchable. Content that can’t be retrieved at the moment of need may as well not exist. ## The cost of the findability gap The hidden cost here is recoverable productivity, and at scale, the numbers are significant. Using a conservative model from the research: if employees spend roughly one hour per week searching for information, and improved findability recovers just 40% of that time, that’s 19.2 hours per employee per year reclaimed. At a fully loaded hourly cost of $60, that’s approximately $1,152 per employee annually. For a 500-person organization, that’s $576,000. For every 1,000 employees, roughly $1.15 million in recoverable capacity. And that’s only counting time. The broader costs are harder to quantify but just as real: compliance exposure when outdated procedures circulate unchecked, quality inconsistencies when teams act on conflicting guidance, disengaged employees who stop trying to find answers and start guessing, subject matter experts pulled away from their actual work to serve as human search engines, and institutional knowledge lost permanently when tenured employees leave. The research puts it plainly: recreating training materials that can’t be reliably located squanders the significant investments organizations make in the first place. [Get your copy of the research](https://www.panopto.com/resource/ebook/findability-gap-report/) for full breakdowns by industry and organization size. ## Three ways to address the findability gap The research points to three deliberate changes. ### Make content searchable Not just by title or course name, but inside the video itself, down to the exact moment an employee needs. This is a fundamentally different capability than what most organizations have today, where search stops at the folder level. ### Centralize on one system of record Search without centralization doesn’t scale. If content lives in six places, employees have to search six places, and most won’t. A single trusted library is what makes the other two ways possible. ### Deliver at the moment of need Employees shouldn’t have to leave their workflow to find an answer. Whether that means embedding content in Teams, surfacing it through SharePoint search, or linking directly from a process document, the goal is frictionless access at the point of execution. ## How Panopto can help ### Search inside every video Panopto was built around a core insight that most video platforms miss: the most valuable thing you can do with a video isn’t store it; it’s make everything inside it searchable. Every word spoken in a recording, every slide displayed, every document referenced is automatically indexed. Employees don’t have to watch a 45-minute onboarding video to find the two minutes they actually need. They search, jump to the moment, and move on. [Learn more about intelligent search](https://www.panopto.com/features/video-search/). ### Functionality where your teams already work That searchability extends across the tools your teams already use. Panopto integrates with Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, and leading LMS platforms, so employees can find training content without leaving the systems they already use. When someone searches in SharePoint, Panopto results surface alongside everything else. [See all integrations.](https://www.panopto.com/features/integrations/) ### A view into what’s actually being used From the L&D side, Panopto [gives administrators visibility](https://www.panopto.com/product-add-ons/knowledge-insights/) into what’s actually being watched, not just completion rates, but engagement at the video level: where people drop off, what they rewatch, who has and hasn’t accessed critical content. That’s the data needed to measure whether your training investment is working. ### Existing content becomes searchable video For teams looking to modernize their content library, [Panopto’s Elai integration](https://www.panopto.com/generative-ai-video/) converts existing materials, slide decks, PDFs, and documents into searchable video with AI-generated avatars and multilingual support, making it practical to bring legacy content into a findable, centralized system without rebuilding it from scratch. AI capabilities, including automatic transcription, captioning, skill tagging, and translation, all serve the same underlying goal: making knowledge discoverable for every employee, in every role, in every language. ## Close the gap with Panopto Every day the findability gap stays open, organizations pay for training employees can’t use and leave recoverable productivity on the table. Make the content you already have findable.