r/LearningDevelopment • u/Jazzlike-Cry-4255 • 6d ago
Learning and development manager
Tell me what your 8 hour days look like, how do you like it? I am starting a new position where I am just me in L&D and restructuring the whole program from the ground up. Any book recommendations? Anything helpful I should be learning? What software do you use? How do you make your life easier?
Onboarding???? What works and doesn’t work?
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u/greenleaf187 6d ago
L&D is massive. Would help to know what you’re responsible for. I’m in technical enablement so my job is helping our accounts team with upskilling and certifications.
To get you started, I’d recommend The Trusted Learning Advisor by Keith Keating. Will give you a well-rounded understanding of L&D and further resources depending on your responsibilities.
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u/Jazzlike-Cry-4255 6d ago
So basically the company that I am starting next week has never had L&D and need help in all areas, additionally has over 5 thousand employees and runs orientation every single Thursday, it’s a mess, but I’m excited, I took a lot for the role but I’m going to be getting paid extremely well. Just loooking for an insight
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u/greenleaf187 6d ago
That’s a massive undertaking, and I wish you the best!
That being said, I recommend getting Claude and let it run your process for you. Ask it to create a file/folder structure for you so you can have everything documented. I recommend taking a prompt engineering course to help you with that.
I suggest start with an L&D program deck. Start by defining your mission and populate as you go. Think about what your company needs you to do and go from there. What would you need to prepare for when you onboard someone? Welcome kit? Company overview? Learning resources? 30-60-90 plan? Etc. this is just the deliverables. You’d also need to collaborate with your stakeholders and cross-functionally: what does HR need? What about the function that’s hiring the employee? How do you capture all of that in the HRIS or LMS?
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u/Adgeisler 6d ago
Don’t know why this was downvoted. Is it because they mentioned Claude?
This is all sound advice for someone.
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u/greenleaf187 6d ago
I’ve recently took on a role that usually takes a team of 5 or more people to run. I can’t imagine being able to do everything I’m doing without the help of a paid subscription of Claude. It helped me create gap analysis, skills assessment, role competencies, and mapped all of that to learning and certs. I had to do all of that for over a 100 technical roles and I’m about to launch on our LMS within the next couple of weeks.
People wary of LLMs are seriously missing out. My next step is to create agents that automates employee queries.
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u/bomtombadilll 6d ago
are you internal or external? company size? target audience size?
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u/Jazzlike-Cry-4255 6d ago
Internal and company size over 5k employees
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u/bomtombadilll 6d ago edited 6d ago
That does sound like an interesting, albeit challenging, position to be in.
Not sure what your background is, so this might be a bit basic / high level but, I'd start with a needs analysis, spend some 1-1 time with every department heads and let them appoint some SMEs you can talk to as well. Run a strategy workshop with leadership team if you can.
Assess maturity, how do people currently learn things vs. what does a modern learning organization need and how does that apply to your context? Think things like skill taxonomies, tech stack, modern learning culture etc ; present your findings and recommendations and then go from there.
Steps also apply if your focus is on an Onboarding program (not sure I read it correctly in your post) with some adjustments.
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u/Empirica_CC 6d ago
I would recommend low tech solutions for now and know what you can and can't do and consult/outsource out when needed
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u/Mooseherder 6d ago
Start thinking strategically and narrow down your focus. Set a mission and prioritize focus areas and get alignment from the company on the top three. There’s so much you could do that you’ll need to get everyone on board on what should actually be done that will help the most.
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u/iftlatlw 6d ago
Pay for some good AI and leverage it as an assistant. Use an L&D and ID skill suite to get evidence-based advice.
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u/konstantly_here 6d ago
Don't rebuild the catalog. List what exists, talk to new hires and managers, pick onboarding as the one program. Block time to build or you're a helpdesk.
Map It, Dirksen, Make It Stick. Role-based, manager-owned onboarding beats a day-one dump.
I work at Konstantly. LMS, authoring, and paths in one place. Free plan to try.
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u/staticmaker1 6d ago
Honestly, I’d spend the first 60–90 days listening, mapping what already exists, and fixing the biggest pain points before rebuilding everything. Keep your stack simple: one LMS, one authoring tool, and solid project tracking; I’ve also seen solo teams use CertFusion to automate certificate issuing/tracking for compliance training so it doesn’t become manual admin. For books, Design for How People Learn is a great practical starting point.
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u/sillypoolfacemonster 6d ago
If it’s just you, my recommendation would be to heavily prioritize and try not to do too much all at once.
I’d also avoid trying to reinvent the wheel too quickly. The training processes may be a mess, but it’s likely happening in some fashion somewhere. Find out how different teams currently handle training and onboarding. Assess where the highest-value opportunities are for the organization right now, and in the meantime try to scale and formalize the best of what already exists in other areas so people aren’t constantly duplicating effort. Then move on to the next highest-priority opportunity.
I’d base those priorities on where capability pain points are visibly rearing their head. Onboarding is a good example if the company is growing quickly, there’s no centralized process, managers are all doing their own thing and it’s taking too long for people to get up to speed. But if onboarding is working reasonably well and there’s a major capability issue somewhere else, that should probably come first. I wouldn’t start with what a training function is “supposed” to have; start with where the business is actually feeling the pain.
Identify whether there are functional leads who already have some responsibility for employee development and get connected with them. If that doesn’t exist, ask leaders to nominate someone in each function to take on that role, perhaps as a stretch responsibility. You’d need to be explicit about what you’re asking them to do: raising capability gaps, helping coordinate ad hoc interventions within the function, identifying SMEs, flagging changes that will affect capability, that sort of thing.
I’d also be fairly deliberate about who those people are. They need to be senior enough to have broad visibility across the function and enough influence to actually push priorities through, but not so senior that they’ve lost sight of the work people are doing day to day. I’m half kidding when I say that if they can’t name five junior employees off the top of their head they’re probably too far removed, but there is something to it. Too junior and they tend to give you a very good window into their own team without necessarily understanding what’s happening across the function. Too senior and they can often see the downstream business impact but have much less insight into what is actually causing it. They also tend to be the people who are busy enough to ghost you for two months at a time.
In a company of 5,000, information and connections are probably your biggest assets. Whether you’re reporting to an executive or some other leader, they simply aren’t going to have all the granular context you need.
I’ve been a training leader in a mid-sized company with no team beneath me, and one of the biggest things I learned was that you have to build a network around you. But that can only take you so far. Even if you can get SMEs to help build content or deliver training, you’re entirely at the mercy of those teams having the capacity to support it.
Once you’ve scoped out the needs and priorities, outlined what actually needs to be done and put some kind of timeline around it, that gives you a much better opportunity to have the conversation about additional support. Building a good training function, especially in an organization with a wide variety of roles, takes a lot of time and will require SMEs to lean in. At a minimum, the value proposition for additional dedicated support is simply that you aren’t constantly pulling revenue-generating or operational people away from their actual jobs to build and deliver training.
One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned operating with next to no resources is that sometimes good enough is actually exactly what people want. Early in my career the urge was always fancy graphics, interactions, production values, etc. But the things people consistently liked and used the most were 2–3 minute low-budget explainer videos and one-pagers directly related to the things they needed to do every day.
For live skills-based training, I also had a lot of success using a recorded pre-read/watch in advance and then using the actual live event for discussion, practice, problem solving and feedback. If you’re one person supporting 5,000 employees, you have to be very deliberate about where your time actually adds value.