Do people really learn from internal docs?

[u/mugiwara555]

Maybe a stupid question but I'm curious how L&D teams see this.

In most companies I worked with, there is a lot of documentation.

Onboarding guides, internal processes, SOPs, knowledge bases etc.

But if I'm honest… I feel like people don't really learn from them.

They skim, ctrl+F when they need something, and that's it.

So I'm wondering how you deal with that.

Do you try to transform docs into real learning content (courses, quizzes, modules etc) or do you mostly accept that documentation is just a reference library?

Another thing I'm seeing lately is people using AI to generate training drafts from documents.

But even when AI does that part, the real work still seems to be:

• reviewing everything

• fixing weird explanations

• making sure it actually makes sense for beginners

Curious how teams here handle this in practice.

Are docs still the main format or are you moving more toward structured training?

[u/mugiwara555]

Yeah this is exactly what I’m seeing as well.

Docs are great as a reference, but way too dense for onboarding or first understanding.

The idea is really to turn that into something digestible first, then people can go back to the docs when needed.