If you have ever run a virtual class, you have seen a learner's face lit by the blue glow of another window. Or stood in a meeting room, looked down the rows and seen half the laptops open on email. Every trainer knows the scene. TalentLMS's latest survey shows how common it has become.
The platform's 2026 L&D report surveyed 1,000 full-time US employees who had received training in the past twelve months, plus 101 HR managers. Seventy percent of learners admitted doing other things during training, the highest level in the three years TalentLMS has been tracking it1.
The stated cause is blunt. Half of HR managers and 53 percent of employees said workload is what limits the time available for learning1. People are not multitasking because the session is dull. They multitask because their work keeps running while they sit in class.
The striking detail is that satisfaction with training actually rose, to 84 percent1. Learners are satisfied even though seven in ten are not giving it their full attention. That is why end-of-course surveys, the one-to-five-star kind, say almost nothing about whether learning took place.
An experiment in Canada
In 2013 three researchers, Faria Sana, Tina Weston and Nicholas Cepeda, published an experiment in the journal Computers & Education, run with university students in Canada. They set up a simulated classroom: students listened to a lecture, took notes on laptops, and then sat a comprehension test2.
In the first experiment, one group was asked to complete some unrelated online tasks during the lecture, such as looking things up. That group scored about 11 percent lower on the test than those who only took notes2,3.
The second experiment is the one that should make trainers think again. This time participants took notes with pen and paper, and nobody used a laptop. But some were seated where they could see the screens of other people who were multitasking, in fact members of the research team. Those who merely sat nearby scored about 17 percent lower than those with no screen in view2,3.
In other words, multitasking is not a private matter. It spills over to the people around, who have done nothing wrong.
What it means for designers and trainers
TalentLMS's 70 percent says the problem lies more in the calendar than in the content. A two-hour session in the middle of a busy working day will have seven in ten people running something else alongside it, however good the material. Sana and her colleagues add another layer: in a classroom, every screen open on email lowers the effectiveness of the people sitting behind it.
The two usual fixes both have limits. More engaging content helps somewhat but does not empty anyone's inbox. Banning laptops removes the visual distraction but not the worry about unfinished work.
The more durable fixes tend to lie outside the classroom: negotiating learning time with line managers before a cohort opens, breaking content into short pieces placed in quieter periods, and keeping face-to-face sessions for the parts that genuinely need interaction.
The TalentLMS survey has one more number worth noting: 79 percent of companies say they are moving to skills-based hiring and development1. When skills become the measure, protected learning time becomes a resource rather than a perk.
Designing a session that resists multitasking
Multitasking cannot be eliminated, but a session can be designed so it is harder to do and does less damage.
Open with something that needs hands and attention: a group exercise or a problem to solve within the first ten minutes. Learners decide whether to focus in those opening minutes. Break the session into short cycles of fifteen to twenty minutes, each ending with something learners have to do, rather than one long lecture.
In virtual classes, give each person a specific role in each part: note-taker, questioner, summariser. People who know they will have to speak shortly open their email less. And build in an "urgent work break" mid-session: five minutes for everyone to deal with messages, instead of doing it covertly throughout.
None of this replaces negotiating time with line managers. But it keeps the time you have won from being wasted.
