Intro
Companies use terms like 'learning and development,' 'education,' 'training,' 'enablement,' and 'professional development' to describe their workforce improvement efforts. While these terms are often used interchangeably, they have nuanced differences.
This post aims to provide a framework that categorizes various aspects of 'workforce enablement' under the broader umbrella of 'learning & development'. I prefer this term I for its inclusiveness and clarity in describing a company's goals.
Why do we need learning & development?
L&D plays a crucial role in driving business forward. At its core, L&D optimizes operations and facilitates achieving business goals. As organizations scale, they must teach their workforce how to work effectively and prepare for future challenges. This creates enduring organizations with strong, distinctive operating cultures while generating employee goodwill through direct investment in their personal and professional growth. It can create shared experiences among the employee base, fostering connection. Yet often, L&D is not done meaningfully at scale at organizations, leaving employees to figure out how to do their jobs on their own.
Businesses are complex systems with multiple functions designed to create goods and services that are exchanged for money. Each function of a business is built to serve these goals, whether by investing in product development, marketing and selling the product, and managing the finances. These are generally all seen as essential to operating the business successfully. The people who facilitate and manage these processes are generally, on paper, more or less interchangeable when looking at the business as a system. However, two companies with different sets of people doing the same functions and delivering the same type of product could get wildly different outcomes. The question is: how do we build systems that get good outcomes? Beyond strategy and process, it comes down to the right people.
L&D, like other "people" functions, is not often viewed as essential to the business' operations. The strategy and mechanisms of the business that deliver what's sold is generally perceived as most critical, because of the tangible result it delivers.
This leads to L&D investment and importance getting overlooked. In short, there are two primary reasons for this: difficulty measuring ROI and the preference to hire already-qualified candidates.
Attributing success to L&D efforts is tough. There are many factors at play that can influence employee performance beyond L&D efforts. This makes it difficult for companies to attribute success directly to L&D. For most companies, the best you can do is show correlation between training engagement and performance, and even then, the actual "lift" of education is not easily parsed. Compared with other business efforts to improve revenue or cut costs, L&D's success is hard to measure the same way you can measure something more straightforward like a return on ad spend metric or seeing if a sales person hit quota. Investing in L&D can feel like a "cost" because it can feel like a requirement to meet legal requirements (i.e. compliance training). It also does not have a clear throughline to revenue. Sales sells a deal: you can directly attribute that revenue to a salesperson. L&D's role in that is much harder to quantify.
Second, companies may also prefer to hire those with expertise already. It can be easier to increase salaries to attract talent from competitors with similar skillsets than building a system to hire and develop employees regardless of their background. It's simpler to recruit someone who has succeeded in a similar role elsewhere than to develop that capability internally. This approach makes sense for perhaps the most senior hires, especially in cases where the business is trying to go through a turnaround period, or if the business wants to expand into a new industry or product line they lack internal expertise to do alone. These are strong use cases for going outside to hire someone else. However, for most rank and file employees, outside of niche areas, it becomes costly and time consuming to find people who possess the "ideal" background and experience, such as hiring from a direct competitor or someone with the "right" on paper experience.
Hiring for the broader workforce is different. A company building a Taco Bell competitor can only hire so many frontline workers from Yum! Brands. As companies grow, velocity of hiring becomes important to meet aggressive goals and maintain momentum. Limiting who you hire to those with experience already not only reduces the total pool of people you can hire, but it will also increase your costs to lure employees away from peer brands for more money.
The more you can do to build up your workforce and invest in them early in their careers, the company will experience more savings and achieve better outcomes. Investing in strong L&D programs enables companies to widen the pool of talent, allowing them to hire faster, hire people that competitors don't feel they can hire, and enable employees to do their jobs better faster. This helps employees grow as the business system evolves and changes.
Player development in baseball
I'm a baseball fan. Baseball offers a fascinating analog to the business world. Beyond stadium economics and sponsorship deals, there's the strategic management of team rosters—essentially workforce planning—that requires careful consideration. The major leagues consist of thirty teams all seeking competitive advantages while pursuing the same goal: winning a World Series.
One crucial differentiator between teams is their approach to talent evaluation and development. Baseball recruiting, known as scouting, involves professionals traveling worldwide to observe young players and project their potential at the highest level. This intuitive assessment based on observation and interaction is complemented by technical analysis—from basic statistics to advanced biomechanical data that forecasts growth potential and identifies physical attributes that can be refined.
After signing players, teams assign them to "farm teams", or minor leagues. Athletes spend years in the minor leagues honing their skills against increasingly challenging opponents while receiving professional coaching. Their time on the farm teams is often spent with "player development" staff who focus on unlocking potential and finding ways to optimize performance of budding professionals.
Why do teams make this investment? In part, because the obvious talent is expensive and everyone knows they're the best. This further drives up player salaries. In addition, it's cheaper in the long run to build a system that identifies and develops players, even if it requires more investment upfront.
Teams constantly seek advantages in this process. While identifying the top prospect in each draft class is relatively straightforward, discovering hidden talents who need only minor adjustments to become exceptional performers creates significant value. Getting a first round pick right is an expectation, but finding a viable major leaguer past the fifth round is an unexpected boon.
For baseball organizations, "player development" represents their investment in elevating players to elite competition. Beyond ensuring their best players are well-conditioned and getting the most out of their talents, this function also elevates later round picks who need more help to unlock their potential.
Businesses should adopt similar thinking. You may secure only so many "first round pick" hires who deliver immediate value through demonstrated skill and experience. These talents typically command premium salaries, possess robust networks, and show consistent industry success. Their services are in high demand, and few individuals operate with such competence. Not every organization can attract these candidates.
However, many potential employees aren't obvious superstars. Additionally, early career employees with limited formal experience are easily passed over. Even if a hire initially performs at only 70% of desired capacity, selecting for the right attributes and motivations allows you to help cover the rest. The key is identifying the traits you can't teach and optimizing your recruiting process to finding people who excel there, then building L&D to optimize for teaching these people the things your organization can do well: product, role-specific training, etc.
Some large organizations excel at this approach. Big Four accounting firms actively recruit on college campuses, identifying promising accounting students, building relationships, and investing in their future through internships and resources. By graduation, they've secured pre-trained employees ready to contribute, with further development opportunities available. Costco famously promotes from within their warehouses; their current CEO began at that level. Bringing in talent based on attributes early in their careers into roles with lower barrier to entry and then training them to build skills to grow into other roles is a long term play that creates good will with employees and saves the company money. Most importantly, team members develop intimate knowledge of the business, building familiarity and experience with "front line" work and customer engagements.
This intimate business knowledge reinforces organizational values and enables more effective decision-making based on deep understanding of how the business works at each level. Not only do employees that grow with the organization develop this intimate familiarity, they also foster relationships across the organization. They will have a stronger emotional connection to the business that took a chance on them before they "made it big".
These investments and outcomes resist simple measurement. Dismissing them as necessary expenses diminishes the people who drive business forward. For a well-run company to succeed in its mission, strategy must be executed and refined by individuals at all organizational levels, so investing in their development increases retention (reducing costs) while improving execution quality (enhancing returns). Attributing these benefits specifically to learning and development remains challenging but not impossible. We'll address this further later.
For now, I'll outline five learning and development categories and two implementation timeframes. Subsequently, we'll cover optimal team structuring for building and delivering these solutions, plus best practices for establishing them at different business stages.
Five types of training
1. Company Culture & Values Every organization has a unique cultural fingerprint. Beyond the polished statements on a website, a company's true culture determines how work actually gets done. While technical skills matter, understanding the often "unwritten" rules of the company culture usually precedes getting things done.
Think of robust culture training as providing an essential navigation system. It answers the question every employee faces: "How do I succeed here?"
Without this guidance, talent wastes valuable time decoding expectations through trial and error. This invisible tax affects everything—meetings, hiring decisions, client interactions, and daily collaboration. In today's diverse workforce, teams brings varied cultural backgrounds, communication styles, and experiences. In addition, teams work on increasingly technical areas and need to collaborate across functions. Fostering clarity in how teams should engage and how to communicate effectively in the organization helps "set the rules" for teams to follow that set the operating rhythm and expectations.
By clearly defining values and expected behaviors, you create a shared operational language. This isn't about conformity—it's about clarity. When expectations are transparent, execution accelerates. Teams make decisions with confidence rather than hesitation.
Effective culture training spans the employee lifecycle: from onboarding that immerses new hires in your methods to interview training that ensures consistent talent evaluation to process workshops that standardize cross-functional collaboration.
This type of training focuses on teaching employees about the company values and its unique processes and ways of working. The goal with this training is not to indoctrinate, but to inform employees what norms look like in the company. Clear expectations of how to work enable teams to move faster and with greater certainty, in large part because it's clear what those expectations are for being successful.
The type of training in this umbrella ranges from new hire training to interview training to trainings on internal company processes and practices that cut across the organization.
Toyota has the "Toyota Way". Amazon has "Leadership Principles". "Turn the Ship Around" also covered the cultural code of their nuclear submarine. This goes back to the values that the organization embodies, informing thinking and how to best operate. Leaders should craft training programs to help new team members assimilate to the environment so they can operate effectively and in line with the company's values and ethics.
In short, teaching "how we do things" helps improve ramp times and fosters greater connection across teams, accelerating outcomes.
2. Role & Job Skills Once your team understands the cultural operating system, they need a specific user manual: their role. This defines the precise contribution each person is paid to deliver. While culture establishes how we work together, role clarity determines what each person must master. Sales training receives the lion's share of investment for good reason. Your revenue engine consists of a unified team with a clear mission: drive growth. Their skills directly impact the bottom line, making ROI calculations straightforward. Other departments, with their specialized roles and varied contributions, often lack this clarity of measurement and purpose. In addition, they lack scale: making broad role-based L&D a less viable investment for most organizations.
Customer-facing teams also receive substantial skills development, as they directly influence retention and satisfaction metrics. Engineering teams may receive targeted training on systems and processes specific to your technology stack.
The most effective organizations don't stop at cultural onboarding. They invest in craft mastery: teaching not just the universal principles of a profession, but how to excel in your specific environment.
Some companies develop reputations for building strong people in specific functions. In my recruiting days, we used to target people from specific companies that developed this reputation for developing strong performers. This brand was not just due to company success, but the quality of people they identified and cultivated.
So while company culture and values training explains how things work here; skills training equips people to deliver results within that framework, becoming experts at their job. Becoming a known employer where individuals in specific roles can excel is an important edge in hiring. Baseball teams known for their ability to develop pitchers become destinations for rising stars, even if those companies don't win or pay the most: it becomes a good career move, helping them and the organization become more competitive. The same is true in business. How many engineers want to work at Google? Beyond compensation, there is also a desire to be part of what is perceived as an excellent engineering culture.
Companies that invest in both dimensions create a multiplicative effect. Their teams don't just understand expectations—they possess the tools to exceed them.
In a competitive talent market, developing role-based training helps you recruit from a broader pool of applicants, but also supports retention. Finding the "fifth round picks" and developing them into stars creates higher performing employees that boost performance.
3. Product Every single person in the company must understand what you actually sell. Would you trust a recruiter who didn't know what the company did or how the role they're hiring for? Would a marketer be effective at writing copy if they didn't understand the details of how their product solved customer problems?
Regardless of role or seniority, each employee should clearly grasp your product offerings, industry dynamics, and how value is delivered to customers.
Too many organizations treat product knowledge as relevant only to customer-facing roles. They leave most employees to piece together understanding through osmosis or hallway conversations. This critical oversight undermines alignment and dilutes your competitive edge.
Consider the impact when everyone truly understands your business core: The accountant who recognizes revenue patterns because they understand product cycles. The recruiter who confidently addresses candidate concerns by articulating your market position. The facilities manager who configures workspace to support how your product teams actually collaborate.
Deep product knowledge doesn't just enable employees to perform their immediate responsibilities, it enables employees to contextualize their functional expertise and apply it in the best way possible. People make better decisions when they understand how those decisions influence company performance. They spot connections others miss. They solve problems more creatively.
In the most effective organizations, product training isn't a departmental afterthought—it's a foundational element of company-wide development. When everyone understands what you build and why customers buy it, not only are teams better equipped to work with customers, but also with each other. Shared understanding and experience fosters collaboration and stronger connections.
4. Leadership Leadership training represents far more than management mechanics—it's the deliberate cultivation of your organization's future. Beyond basic supervisory skills, effective leadership development blends company-specific context: how to lead authentically within your unique culture, set the standard for teams, make tough personnel decisions, and navigate cross-functional partnerships to drive results.
This investment directly fuels the succession pipeline, transforming skilled individual contributors into organizational stewards. Too many companies underinvest here, then face painful gaps when growth demands new leadership layers. Internally developed leaders bring invaluable cultural fluency and institutional knowledge that external hires cannot match.
In certain cases, external hiring for senior leaders is wise: The company is starting a new effort or is in decline and the board seeks to reverse the decay by bringing in some new. These cases make sense for companies to bring in people from the outside to "clean house" and forge a new direction. However, this isn't wise if things are going well and you want it to continue: your sustainable competitive advantage comes from within. Leaders who have navigated your systems, absorbed your values through experience, and built relationship capital across departments will be better at sustaining success.
For organizations on solid footing, prioritizing internal leadership development delivers superior outcomes. These homegrown leaders embody your culture's strengths while bringing enough perspective to address its weaknesses. They make decisions through a lens that balances innovation with cultural continuity.
The most successful companies make leadership development systematic rather than accidental. They identify potential early, provide graduated challenges with meaningful feedback, and create structured exposure to business complexity well before promotion. This investment doesn't just fill the leadership pipeline: it signals to every ambitious employee that growth is possible without leaving.
5. Compliance Compliance training represents the organization's necessary guardrails—anti-harassment, data security, ethical conduct, and regulatory requirements. While less strategic than other development areas, it provides critical protection against legal and reputational risks.
Compliance is often treated as a mandatory check-the-box exercise. However, while it is easy to assume employees will be well-intended, even an employee who clicks through a mandatory training may not fully abide by company ethics and policy if ethics aren't reinforced culturally.
By connecting compliance to your values, you transform obligation into meaningful guidance. When employees understand how ethical boundaries align with company principles, they're more likely to internalize and apply these standards daily.
When done thoughtfully, these programs translate complex regulations into practical behaviors that safeguard both the company and its people.
Training periods
The implementation of all training categories (culture, skills, product, leadership, and compliance) falls into two distinct phases with fundamentally different approaches.
Onboarding When employees are new to an organization or role, smart ones will look at this as a time to learn. They lack established habits, recognize their knowledge gaps, and have dedicated time allocated for absorption. This phase represents your greatest opportunity for comprehensive knowledge transfer. Smart organizations capitalize on this window, recognizing that while immediate productivity isn't expected, accelerated ramp-up directly impacts bottom-line results.
This period is when formal training is best: live classroom sessions, certifications, self-paced e-learning, etc. These formats are formal and provide a solid baseline. From there, pair this with shadowing opportunities and chances to engage with customers. I particularly like the practice of having employees do a week or more on frontline work to engage with customers and learn from them. I also think shadowing sales meetings is a good use of time here. Not only do these activities help foster network in the company, but they also show people how things are done: bringing what's learned into the classroom into life. This helps ramp them into the organization, thinking through how they can apply their expertise as they settle into their core role.
Ongoing For established employees, learning must fit within their day-to-day. High performers rarely feel they can pause productivity for development. This reality requires a fundamentally different approach—bite-sized, contextual learning moments integrated into workflow rather than separated from it. Classrooms and formal certifications disrupt the flow of work and may cover things they already live and breathe.
The most effective organizations create a culture where continuous improvement is valued alongside execution, then deliver training in formats that respect time constraints.
The execution challenge is matching delivery format to phase. Comprehensive programming works during onboarding, but fails for tenured staff. Conversely, short-form, informal educational content (think watching a five minute video that outlines common objections from customers about a new product feature) serves ongoing needs but creates insufficient foundation for newcomers.
Organizations that excel in development recognize this distinction—leveraging the onboarding window for deep immersion while creating sustainable learning rhythms that established employees can maintain without sacrificing performance.
Onboarding employees need to establish a foundation to contextualize what they learn next. Tenured employees have this foundation and need to supplement it with education to keep their skills and knowledge sharp.
For example, I studied business in university to build a foundation. When I want to learn a new concept or find out more about an industry or job function, I may search for relevant news, find a book, or watch a video to learn more. I'm not going back for a second bachelors unless I'm planning a more significant pivot. For employees with experience working at the company, they are likely going to need smaller refreshers versus broader, formal learning opportunities.
What's Next
We'll talk more about how to execute on each of these. For now, this introduction provides a blueprint for thinking through what L&D is and how to break it apart into distinct components to build and manage, weaving it into your overall talent strategy.