How to build an L&D Team
Building a Learning & Development (L&D) team in a growing company typically follows an iterative process driven by organizational scale and evolving needs. Let's talk about common experiences with how L&D organizations get their start and scale as they prove value and the organization matures.
How L&D usually starts
Small organizations naturally enable direct knowledge transfer. Early employees learn directly from founders who possess deep knowledge of the product, customers, and business processes. Without significant size or structure, new joiners in an early stage company work alongside leaders and founders, getting direct exposure to best practices, company values, and tactics to be successful in their roles.
However, as organizations scale, founder access diminishes. While the first salesperson will have unparalleled access to founders, the twelfth sales hires will not get anywhere close to the same level of access.
Responsibility shifts. Middle managers become responsible for onboarding while juggling other responsibilities like pipeline management and traveling to visit clients. While they help founders scale, middle managers lack the full view and context that enabled early hires to be successful. In addition, more teammates make it difficult to invest in each the same way as in the early days.
This creates a knowledge gap that initially might be addressed through informal materials created by managers or motivated individual contributors. As founders have
However, these stopgap measures become inefficient as the organization grows. Sales professionals are incentivized to focus on customer conversations, not training development. This tension typically triggers the decision to invest in dedicated L&D.
Sole practitioner
When hiring the first L&D professional, two critical questions emerge:
1) "What specific needs should this person address?" 2) "Where should they sit in the organization to maximize impact?"
While sales teams often present the highest perceived ROI for training, the greatest opportunity typically lies in new employee onboarding. New hires represent the highest-risk population. They've taken a career risk, need to learn rapidly, and are most receptive to training. Leaders also expect and allocate time for this learning curve. So for most growing companies, I generally recommend focusing on onboarding first, then branching out to provide specialized training for the largest population, which is likely a sales, customer service, or frontline employee pending the type of business.
The sole practitioner must therefore focus on building a comprehensive onboarding program while wearing multiple hats: program manager, learning designer, facilitator, and coordinator. This versatile individual should:
1) Move quickly to relieve burden from team memberss previously handling training.
2) Understand organizational pain points through data analysis (turnover rates, time-to-productivity metrics)
3) Prioritize live training opportunities that can be easily modified during growth phases. These are typically easiest to build, enabling the individual to show value fast and iterate based on feedback. Scale what gets good feedback and is most easily repeatable through video recordings or text-based self-paced courses to enable scale and tracking.
4) Coordinate knowledge-sharing activities (call reviews, shadowing, role-plays). This person should alleviate the administrative burden of the business teams and elevate the quality of the experience, adding rigor to measurement and orchestration.
5 ) Ensure compliance training requirements are met. Early stage companies generally aren't focused on compliance. As companies mature and requirements are scrutinized, ensuring that the team is compliant in various legal regulations will be important to earning trust with prospective customers.
Establishing functional competency with multiple team members
The above can quickly become a lot for a sole practitioner. As companies continue to grow and learn what works, there is an opportunity to scale L&D. This involves digitizing more training and expanding L&D to support a bigger organization. While early stages may only require onboarding, the increased complexity of the organization will lead to growing L&D needs, meaning specialization is likely the right move. While I would expect a sole practitioner to be able to automate onboarding delivery and start specialized training, the size of the organization will mean there are greater demands, especially if the program is yielding value to the company.
In my own experience, the need for scaling L&D came when there were more training requests than I could manage, as well as a growing catalog of content and experiences across multiple offices and geographies that require a greater level of support. If you're doing a good job measuring ROI, making the case for additional support is much easier than a more vibes-based "I'm too busy to do it all" type of argument. People who manage company coffers need to see ROI, and the more you can link L&D to outcomes through correlation and with appropriate guardrails like adoption and survey metrics, the better chances you'll have to scale. We'll talk more about measuring L&D ROI separately.
Specialization in L&D will vary pending how you're doing training and the type of organization you're primarily supporting at this stage. To me, the optimization to make is whether you are biasing towards live training or self-paced, digital experiences. The other consideration is at the program level. For example, onboarding programs will have broader segments to manage and different requirements than ongoing sales training or engineering career development training.
In short, there's no one way to scale beyond a single person. It depends on the business, the growth trajectory, the needs of the team, and the persona of the target learner that you're focusing on.
At this stage, my recommendation is to focus on scale and broad impact as much as possible. There's little need to specialize only to have a new L&D person focus their time on a more niche part of the business. There isn't enough scale to justify it, and L&D investment would be better elsewhere.
Let's think back to the pillars we discussed previously. Culture and values training, role-specific training, product training, compliance training, and leadership training. Then remember the time periods: onboarding and ongoing. All are relevant over both time periods, so how do we divide and conquer with multiple team members.
At this stage, the company's L&D investments are small enough where there isn't a need to have multiple program managers owning different areas of the business' L&D investment. Instead, it's better to share responsibilities across multiple people.
Let's say you're scaling the team from one L&D practitioner who has served as a generalist to this point, getting the programs up and running. Where do they need help and what is their strong suit? Typically, this person will have built good relatiosnhips across the business and have the knowledge and skills to own strategy, facilitation, and design, in addition to administrative responsibilities. If I was tasked with scaling a training team from one to two and then to three people, I would likely recommend this type of team structure.
1) L&D Program Manager: This person operates like a product manager for the portfolio of L&D programs. They are the primary person responsible for strategy, prioritization, engaging with the business stakeholders, and reporting on success. They should have the pulse on what the needs are and opportunity and think through what the learner needs are from onboarding to ongoing development.
2) L&D Facilitator or Designer: This person should focus on training delivery. They should own the execution of the training. This may include being a moderator or live facilitator of onboarding training sessions. It could also include being the person who records videos, designs e-learnings, and prepares the materials used in sessions. Where you focus here will depend on the needs of the team and their size. Early on, the live facilitation and moderation piece may be more important, but with scale, having someone with greater design skills to help scale self-paced content like video or e-learning modules will be a greater boon. Ideally, you can find someone who does both. Remember, the overall "polish" of the training is less important than actually doing the work. Focus on delivery and finding the best way to do it versus worrying too much about production value.
3) L&D Coordinator and LMS Administrator: This person should provide operational support. They should schedule rooms, manage calendars, order food, pull LMS reporting, set assignments, and so forth. This is likely the role of a junior level employee and the type of person that should get broad exposure by supporting the Program Manager and the Facilitator/Designer. They should be able to grow into other L&D roles as the team scales. By building intimate familiarity with how the programs function and their needs, they can develop unique insights to help further scale things out. This person takes on operational tasks to free up time of the other two individuals to enable them to focus on strategy and delivery.
L&D teams can feel like a rap collective. Depending the task, people may flex into different roles. Companies of all sizes may have people who do all three roles described above. One day you're producing, the next day you write the hook, and so forth. There's a lot of fluidity and flexibility in this space and the skills and interests of the team will vary. It's important to consider this when interviewing for L&D teams that you're getting folks with the right skills that you are looking for.
This three-person team also creates a model that can be scaled, similar to the recruitment teams we discussed earlier. By establishing the three key roles: program manager, designer/facilitator, and coordinator, you can apply this to increasingly specialized portions of the business or L&D portfolio pending how you want to organize during the next phase of growth.
Matrixed organization
When a small functional team can no longer handle organizational needs, consider structuring L&D around:
1) Departments (with dedicated teams for sales, engineering, etc.) 2) Programs (cross-functional initiatives spanning multiple teams) 3) Product areas (specialized around specific offerings)
Regardless of alignment, standardize role definitions (program managers, designers) while allowing for cross-team collaboration. For example, you may want to have a team focused just on the onboarding experience for all employees who partners with teams that own specific departments or product areas.
In general, I prefer working backwards from the role and designing their end-to-end experience. This creates more of a pull approach to L&D over time versus a push approach. For example, if teams are aligned by product, they are incentivized to go heavy on training for that product -- beyond what their learner may actually need. However, if we work backwards from the learner, we can think through their unique story and what they need to be successful, flexing across different areas to meet their needs.
A hybrid approach may be best: For example, having a dedicated onboarding team that owns company culture and values training plus compliance requirements. From there, having teams that own specific departments who work backwards from the ongoing needs of their specific learners, weaving in leadership, product, and role-specific training to extend beyond the initial onboarding period. Creating a map of what learning needs are required throughout the journey of the employee can help you figure out where you need to invest and how to best structure the team to deliver a cohesive experience.
Supporting roles from across the business
L&D does not operate well in a silo. While you may want to hire individuals with industry expertise, good L&D people do not need to have prior industry knowledge to be effective. Good L&D practitioners will be able to learn what their teams needs are, diagnose problems, and propose solutions to meet those needs. L&D practitioners should build a certain level of functional competency in the company, the industry, and the products that they serve, but it's not strictly necessary to have these before starting. If you know what goes into building the structure and are flexible in your mental model based on what you uncover, it shouldn't matter whether you've been an L&D person training fast food workers or solutions architects. In truth,
L&D practitioners will need to find partners across the organization who can serve two purposes: 1) to be sponsors of the L&D program and advise/inform the needs and 2) to serve as subject matter experts to inform content development and/or facilitate as needed.
The truth is that the team doesn't want to hear from L&D people who don't know their job or have the same experience. The team wants to hear from experts, and good L&D practitioners find ways to channel and scale the experiences of others to create positive learning experiences and environments. Building these relationships is crucial for success.
Here are a few key relationships L&D teams need to develop in order to achieve success and get buy-in from the business.
Hiring managers: Hiring managers will have their own POV on the needs of their team. They typically house key info about the competencies of their teams and also need to be bought into the investment of time required for learning. "I need my account executives on the phones!" is something I've heard countless times in my career, and so proving value and building relationships can help get the buy-in for longer term success. Hiring managers should be sponsors of L&D programs, giving permission to their teams to invest and take it seriously, and may also be subject matter-experts, especially for role-specific and leadership training.
Executive leadership: Founders, CFOs, and execs that lead the department with the greatest volume of hires need to be bought into L&D as well. They need to see value, understand the success metrics, and how the L&D team is supporting the overall growth and health of their team. This team needs to be sponsors and advocates. If executive leadership signals that the training investment is important, their teams will listen and invest the time. They should be speakers at onboarding, reinforcing company culture and values, and signal the overall importance and commitment of the company to the growth and development of its employees.
Product and Product Marketing teams: These groups will be primary subject matter experts to inform content design for product and some role-specific training. They will be "in the trenches" with the team to help inform the design of the content. For these groups, it's important to remind them of training's role to reinforce core product messaging and give the team opportunity to practice using and selling products. These groups should be thrilled by the opportunity to scale their work and get feedback from the field through a safe training environment.
HR & Finance: Beyond high-level alignment with the CFO on budget, there also needs to be regular connection with the teams that support compliance requirements. These teams need to be kept in the loop regarding investments in L&D and support any budgeting activities.
L&D can only be successful if everyone is brought into the process and sees the value of its offering.
L&D is fundamentally about scaling the best and brightest parts of the organization: how do we scale all of the insights, skills, and wisdom of the organization into something that can be easily consumed by a new person? L&D helps create a common cultural capital that provides shared experiences, a powerful force in fostering connection and understanding between people. If an organization can develop this type of shared experience, it will achieve better outcomes than those who do not critically inspect their operating culture or don't have a clear framework for operating.
Strong L&D programs will not only create this shared understanding and experience among employees, but will reduce ramp times, increase retention rates, and become a powerful calling card for an employer brand looking to attract more great people to the organization.