My index finger is twitching. Not from caffeine, though the lukewarm office brew is currently staging a small coup in my stomach. It’s twitching because for the last 159 minutes, I have been a biological extension of a Logitech mouse, performing a rhythmic, soul-deadening dance with a ‘Next’ button that seems to mock my very existence. I am currently 89% of the way through a ‘Cybersecurity Awareness’ module, and I can say with absolute certainty that I have learned nothing. In fact, I feel like I’ve actively leaked intelligence into the office carpet. I just pushed a door that clearly said ‘Pull’ on my way back from the breakroom, a testament to the cognitive fog this training has induced. My brain has checked out, and honestly, I don’t blame it.

The Penance of Paper Trails

We are currently living in the era of ‘The Mandatory Training,’ a corporate ritual that has more in common with a medieval penance than actual education. It’s a box-ticking exercise where the box is more important than the person ticking it. The goal isn’t to make you safer, or more efficient, or even more aware. The goal is to create a digital paper trail so that when someone inevitably clicks on a link promising a free $999 gift card from a Nigerian prince, the legal department can point to a PDF and say, ‘Well, we told them not to.’ It’s defensive documentation disguised as professional development, and it’s hollowed out the meaning of learning in the modern workplace.

We’ve all been there, staring at the screen, waiting for the little grey bar to fill up so we can click the button that allows us to see the next screen of information we aren’t going to read. It’s a performance. We are performing the role of ‘Employee Gaining Competence,’ while the company performs the role of ‘Employer Providing Resources.’ It’s a silent agreement to waste each other’s time. And in the process, we are fostering a culture of profound disengagement.

Outsourcing Intuition

I’ve spent about 49 minutes today just trying to figure out why a specific quiz question was marked wrong. The question was: ‘What do you do if you see a suspicious person in the building?’ My answer was ‘Ask them if they’re lost.’ The correct answer, according to the module, was ‘Immediately notify security and do not engage.’ In what world does that make sense? In a world where we’ve outsourced our basic human intuition to a set of rigid, legalistic protocols. We are being trained to stop being humans and start being nodes in a liability-reduction network.

It’s the ultimate irony: the more ‘awareness’ training we take, the less aware we actually become of the world around us because we’re too busy trying to remember the specific jargon of the compliance manual.

Utility vs. Documentation

This ritual teaches us that ‘learning’ is a hurdle, not a prize. It frames education as something that is done *to* you, rather than something you *do*. It’s a passive experience that rewards speed and compliance over depth and understanding. I’ve seen colleagues who can breeze through a 99-slide presentation in 19 minutes, hitting every quiz question with 100% accuracy, yet they couldn’t tell you the basic principles of the policy if their life depended on it. They’ve mastered the art of the ‘compliance guess’-knowing that the longest answer in a multiple-choice question is usually the one the legal team wrote, and therefore, the correct one.

There’s a fundamental disrespect at the heart of this. It’s the company saying, ‘We don’t think you’re smart enough to just be told the rules, so we’re going to force you to watch a puppet show about them.’ It’s infantilizing. And it stands in stark contrast to how we actually learn things when we care about them. When I want to learn how to fix a leaky faucet or calibrate a new piece of tech, I don’t look for a mandatory module. I look for experts. I look for utility. I look for the kind of empowerment that comes from genuine knowledge.

This is why brands that focus on actual utility, like the educational guides and product selections at Bomba.md, feel so much more honest than any corporate internal site. There, the goal is to give you a tool you can actually use, not a certificate that says you looked at a tool.

Corporate training is the opposite [of mattress testing]. It feels ‘productive’ in the moment because the progress bar is moving, but 9 minutes after it’s over, you’ve forgotten everything. You’re left with a sense of depletion, a feeling that a chunk of your day has been surgically removed and replaced with a void.

The Default Answer

I find myself back at the quiz. Question 9: ‘Who is responsible for security at the company?’ A) The IT Department, B) The Security Guard, C) Everyone, D) Gary. I know the answer is C. It’s always C. It’s the inclusive, we-are-all-in-this-together answer that makes the executive team feel good. But the reality is that when you make everyone responsible for everything, no one is responsible for anything. It’s a diffusion of accountability that is the hallmark of the compliance era.

If the training actually mattered, it wouldn’t be mandatory for everyone; it would be specific to those who need it. But specificity is expensive. Generalization is cheap. And so, we all sit through the same 199-second videos on password complexity, even if we’ve been using MFA for years.

The Final Push and the Closed Door

I look at the clock. It’s 3:59 PM. I’ve spent the best part of my afternoon being ‘aware.’ I wonder if Ruby D. ever thinks about the firmness of the chairs we sit in while we do this training. They’re usually ergonomic, designed to support the spine during long periods of productivity. But these chairs aren’t supporting productivity right now. They’re supporting a slow-motion car crash of human potential.

I finally reach the end. The ‘Certificate of Completion’ appears on the screen. I click ‘Download’ because the system won’t let me close the window until I do. I have performed my duty. I am now officially ‘Aware.’ I stand up, stretch my back-which feels like it has the firmness of a $49 mattress-and walk toward the door. I reach for the handle. I push. The door doesn’t budge. I look at the sign. ‘PULL.’