45 Corporate Training Jokes
The anti-bribery module was 47 slides. Slide 12 was a definition of bribery. Slides 13 through 47 were the same definition with different stock photos.
The harassment video featured the same two actors from 2009. They have aged. The scenarios have not.
The phishing test caught the CTO. He clicked the link, entered his password, and then sent an all-hands about vigilance.
The phishing test caught the security team lead. She wrote the test.
I got an email offering a 50 dollar gift card for completing a survey. It was the phishing test. The real survey from HR offered nothing and was also ignored.
After failing the phishing test, I received a digital badge labeled You Got Phished. It is the only badge I have ever earned at this company.
The LMS timed out at slide 38 of 47. It asked if I wanted to resume. I clicked yes. It started at slide 1.
The Next button was greyed out for ten seconds on every slide. This is how the vendor measures engagement.
I never enabled the audio narration. In fifteen years of compliance training, I have not heard a single word spoken aloud.
I failed the quiz seven times in a row. The eighth attempt unlocked my certificate. Compliance achieved.
I saved the completion certificate as a PDF. It is in a folder with 38 other certificates I will never open.
Every May, the GDPR refresher arrives. It is the same refresher. I am no fresher.
Engineering was assigned the SOX training. We do not touch finance. We touched the training anyway.
The data-handling video was assigned to the entire company. Most of us do not have access to data. We were trained on how to not handle the data we cannot reach.
The CPR module was mandatory for the remote desk-workers. We practiced on the mute button.
The active shooter module ended with a five-question quiz. I got one wrong. I have to retake the module.
Your training is due in 7 days. Then 5. Then 3. Then the wall of red bars in the manager dashboard.
Your training is overdue. The email subject line was longer than the training itself.
After the third reminder, my manager's manager was looped in. She had not completed hers either.
Year-over-year completion rate hit 98 percent. Nobody learned anything new. The metric went up. The metric is the goal.
The Healthy Workplace module was 30 minutes long. I watched it at 2x and answered email. Healthy.
The third-party training vendor's UI was last refreshed in 2011. They added a Flash deprecation notice in 2021.
The country dropdown had 240 entries. Including three I am fairly certain are not countries.
The animated avatar was named Janet from Sales. Janet from Sales has been quietly explaining harassment policy to me since 2014.
I clicked the back button. A dialog appeared. Reset progress? I clicked no. It reset progress.
The course had an autoplay carousel of policy highlights. It rotated faster than I could read. I learned nothing. The carousel was satisfied.
I turned on captions. The captions said one thing. The audio said another. Both were wrong. Compliance was achieved on a technicality.
In 2024 they updated the narrator to an AI voice. It mispronounces our company name. Nobody has fixed it. Nobody will.
The cultural sensitivity module was produced by a vendor in one country, for offices in forty-three. It was sensitive to none of them.
The cybersecurity awareness poster is laminated to the breakroom fridge. It has been there since I joined. The threat landscape has changed. The poster has not.
The training platform promised badges. Mine have been Pending Approval for two years.
The company bought a LinkedIn Learning sub-license for every employee. The utilization report showed 4 percent. Half of that was one person watching Excel tutorials at lunch.
I completed the course was auto-shared to my LinkedIn feed. 11 people from my MBA program liked it. Nobody from work.
LinkedIn told me I had been endorsed for Active Listening. The endorsement came from someone I have never spoken to.
The new-hire onboarding video was 90 minutes. The new hire was hired to fix the LMS.
The CEO welcome video gets re-recorded every January. Same script. Slightly different jacket. The strategy is described as bold for the seventh consecutive year.
The corporate values exercise involved writing one value per post-it. We ran out of post-its. We did not run out of values.
The same slide deck was handed to the L&D vendor in 2014. It has been reformatted twice. The content has not been touched. Neither has the typo on slide 9.
The role-play scenario opened with Linda from Accounting raising a concern. Linda has been raising the same concern in the same scenario since 2017. Nobody at Accounting has helped her.
The breakout exercise asked us to discuss a difficult workplace situation. Everyone stared at their laptop. The facilitator broke the silence. We did not.
The off-site was an all-day training. The site was the conference room we work in every day. The off was a coffee break.
I earned a LinkedIn certificate in Agile Foundations. It expired before I noticed I had it.
An email arrived: You are now SOC 2 trained. I was not consulted. I do not know what I agreed to. The auditor was satisfied.
My manager has never completed the managers' training. Her manager has not completed his. Somewhere up the chain, nobody has ever been trained to manage anyone.
The completion deadline was end of quarter. On the last day, the LMS crashed under the load. The deadline moved. The training did not improve.
Why mandatory training is the same everywhere
Every company I have worked at has bought the same compliance module from a slightly different vendor. The slides have a different color scheme, the avatars have different hair, and the narrator has a different accent. The content is identical. The 47-slide anti-bribery walk-through, the harassment scenario where Linda from Accounting raises a concern, the phishing simulation that catches the CTO at least once a year. Every one of these companies has a 98 percent completion rate. Almost none of them have a 98 percent retention rate on the material a week later.
The economics explain it. An L&D team picks a vendor once. The vendor maintains a library that has to satisfy auditors in forty jurisdictions, which means the content is updated to track the most conservative reading of the strictest regulation, which means it never gets shorter and rarely gets sharper. The actor's haircut from 2009 stays because re-shooting costs money and nobody has ever been audited on hair. The Next button greyed out for ten seconds stays because the vendor's contract pays out on time-in-module, and a reader who can skim faster than the module allows is, by that metric, untrained.
What employees actually retain is the texture. The fact that the phishing test exists, which is enough to make a few extra people hover before clicking. The vague sense that bribery is bad. The certainty that the LMS will time out if you walk away. The training is theatre, but the theatre has a small useful side effect: it puts the policy somewhere in the building, even if nobody reads it.
See also
- 55 HR Jokes Only Employees Who Have Met With HR Get: who built the module.
- 65 Corporate Buzzword Jokes for People Who Have Circled Back: the deck the training is based on.
- 50 AI CEO Jokes Every Engineer Has Heard at All-Hands: the executive sponsor of "values training".
- 60 Executive Leadership Jokes for People Who Have Sat Through the Keynote: the people who skipped the training.
- 50 Sysadmin Jokes That Hit Too Close to Home: the engineer running the phishing simulation.
- 55 AI Replacing Jobs Jokes for Everyone Watching the Headlines: the L&D team replaced by an AI-generated module.
- 50 Security Awareness Training Jokes for People Skipping the Quiz: the module right after this one.
- 60 Phishing Email Jokes for People Who Almost Clicked the Link: the simulated email the training is supposed to prepare you for.
- 50 Password Policy Jokes for People on Their 17th Reset This Year: the policy the module says you must follow.
Sources
Authoritative references this article was fact-checked against.