Most L&D teams are not struggling because they lack good people or good intentions. They are struggling because the model they inherited was designed for a world where training was infrequent, centralized, and slow to change. That world is gone. The shift from facilitator to enabler is not a trend to keep an eye on. It is the only learning and development strategy that holds up when skills change faster than any central team can keep pace with. The short version: L&D stops producing all the content, starts building the conditions for others to produce it, and uses governance and data to make sure quality does not slip in the process.
Employee-generated learning (EGL) is the model that makes this shift possible. Rather than routing every training need through a central L&D team, EGL gives subject-matter experts (SMEs) inside business functions the tools to create content directly. L&D moves from producer to enabler: setting the quality bar, providing the authoring infrastructure, and governing what goes out rather than building everything from scratch.
Why L&D teams keep becoming the bottleneck
L&D becomes the bottleneck when a single team is responsible for producing all training content for a fast-changing workforce. The model made sense when organizations trained people once a year, when compliance was the primary driver, and when a centralized team could reasonably stay on top of what the business needed. It was built around control. L&D owned the content, decided who got it, and measured success by who completed it.
Geert de Jong, Enterprise Success Manager at Easygenerator, put it plainly in a recent webinar on learning ecosystems: “L&D used to have control over content — you create something as L&D, you look at what sort of audiences you have, and then you require a certain completion on those learnings, and that’s it.”
That worked when the content did not go stale quickly and when the number of distinct training needs was manageable. None of those conditions exist anymore. Skills cycles have shortened significantly: according to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2023, 44% of workers’ core skills are expected to change within five years. Teams are distributed. The SMEs who hold the most relevant knowledge sit inside business functions, not inside the L&D department. When every piece of training still has to pass through a central team before it reaches learners, the queue gets long and the content arrives late.
The problem is not that L&D teams are too slow. It is that the model asks them to carry something they were never meant to carry alone. A single team responsible for producing all training for a mid-sized organization is already at a structural disadvantage. At the scale most enterprises operate today, it is simply not a workable setup.
What makes this worse is that the bottleneck is often invisible. Completion rates look fine. Courses are going out. The dashboard shows green. But the knowledge people actually need is being shared in Slack threads, passed between colleagues at their desks, or not shared at all.
What it actually means to move from facilitator to enabler
An L&D team moves from facilitator to enabler when it stops producing all content centrally and starts building the infrastructure, governance, and author support that lets others produce content well. The output of the function shifts from courses to systems.
A facilitator produces content and delivers it to learners. An enabler builds the infrastructure for others to produce content well, sets the standards that keep quality consistent, and creates the feedback loops that show whether learning is actually working.
Mark Lamswood, Regional Director of Content at Cornerstone, described this shift directly:
In practice, L&D shifts its attention toward things it was previously too busy to focus on. Governance is one of them: deciding which content types require L&D sign-off, which can be created by SMEs directly, and what the quality bar looks like in either case. Author enablement is another: giving the people inside business functions the tools, templates, and guidance they need to create content that is actually useful. And then there is measurement, which is about building the reporting layer that shows stakeholders what learning is doing for the business rather than just how many people clicked through a module.
Geert described the underlying logic well:
The most concrete version of this shift is the growth of SME-created e-learning. Rather than asking L&D to extract knowledge from experts, package it, and send it back two months later, companies give internal experts the tools to create training directly. The experts stay in the driver’s seat. L&D provides the guardrails and the quality check. This is not L&D outsourcing its own function. It is L&D doing its most valuable function: making knowledge accessible at scale.
The results can be significant. According to ATD’s 2023 State of the Industry report, organizations with strong internal knowledge-sharing cultures report 30–50% faster time-to-competency for new hires compared to those relying solely on centralized training delivery.
Louise Puddifoot, an independent L&D consultant, noticed the same role shift happening across the profession: “The big shift I’ve seen really is L&D people thinking in terms of enablement rather than just design or development. I’ve even started to see ‘enablement’ featuring quite a lot in job titles now for people in learning and development roles.”
That is not a coincidence. It reflects a genuine rethink of what the job actually is.
How peer-to-peer learning fits into a skills-based learning strategy
Peer-to-peer learning becomes a strategic asset when L&D builds the infrastructure to capture and share it, rather than leaving it to happen informally and invisibly. Learning in the flow of work (LIFOW) is the practice of embedding training into daily work rather than separating it as a standalone activity, and peer learning is one of the most effective ways to make that happen at scale.
People have always learned from each other. Before there was a formal training program for something, there was someone more experienced showing a colleague how it worked. Before there was a course on the new process, someone had already figured it out and told their team. Geert described this plainly: “People were always engaging in some sort of training even though they were saying they weren’t, because they’re always learning on the job. They’re hearing things from colleagues, they get shoulder-to-shoulder trainings.”
The difference now is that peer learning can be captured, structured, and shared across the organization rather than staying trapped inside a team or a single conversation.
Worth remembering
A knowledge-sharing culture is not built by asking people to share more. It is built by removing the friction that stopped them sharing in the first place, and by giving the content they create somewhere to live and a way to reach the people who need it.
Joachim, from Envalior, shared a practical example in the webinar chat of what this looks like. His L&D team built their learning environment using a SharePoint hub as the central access point, pulling together their LMS, Easygenerator, an external mentoring program, and a performance goal module into one place. Employees could see everything available to them without navigating between systems. The hub did not replace any of the tools. It connected them in a way that made the whole thing feel coherent to the learner.
A very different example came from Oves Kaiser at Northvolt (another comment in the chat), a workforce of more than 4,000 employees across 110 nationalities in a highly safety-regulated environment. They built a learning journey that kept employees inside a loop of learning, assessment, and competency validation from their first day to their last. At that level of risk, informal knowledge sharing had to become deliberate and trackable, without losing what made it work in the first place.
Both examples share the same underlying logic. L&D sets the structure, SMEs and peers fill it with content, and the system keeps running without requiring a central team to touch every piece of it. That is what a skills-based learning strategy looks like when it is working.
What a learning culture actually looks like in practice
A genuine learning culture exists when employees pursue development without being asked to, because they see a direct connection between learning and their own growth. It cannot be installed with a platform. It has to be built through the relationship between L&D, managers, and the people doing the work.
Culture is the word L&D professionals use when they mean something that cannot be solved with a platform or a program. And that is exactly right. A learning and development strategy built entirely on tools will not produce a learning culture. The tools are necessary but they are not the point.
What actually produces a learning culture is closer to what Joe Murphy shared in the chat during the webinar. People need to understand the why before anything else. Not “why does the company want me to do this training” but “why does this make me better at my job, or better at building the career I want.” When that connection is clear, training does not feel like a task on a checklist. When it is absent, even the best platform in the world will see low engagement. LinkedIn’s 2023 Workplace Learning Report found that 93% of employees say they would stay longer at a company that invests in their development, yet only 34% say their organization gives them opportunities to learn skills they actually want.
Tiffany S, a practitioner who contributed to the same session, offered one of the most grounded descriptions of a learning culture in action. Her team schedules a weekly training block in every agent’s calendar. They maintain a self-serve library of resources that anyone can access without a manager’s approval. Each agent has a personal training transcript that belongs to them and travels with them: not just a record of what the company assigned, but a record of what they chose to develop. She also tracks NPS detractor trends and releases targeted training in response, then watches whether NPS improves. She shares that correlation transparently with agents too, not just with management. That has done more for manager buy-in than any internal deck.
What makes that approach work is not the tools she uses. It is the message underneath it. Your development is yours, not just something the organization monitors. That is a genuinely different relationship between employees and learning, and most organizations have not managed to establish it.
Mark made the same point from the strategic end: “At the heart of it are people, people that need to learn, they need to develop skills. However strategic we might need to be, let’s always think user experience and let’s think about the human and cultural aspects that align with your business.”
The organizations that build genuine learning cultures are the ones where L&D has connected learning to something people actually care about: career growth, day-to-day performance, the ability to do their job well when it counts. A strategy can support that connection. It cannot create it.
How to measure whether your L&D strategy is working beyond completion rates
Completion rates are a floor, not a ceiling. They confirm that training was delivered, not that it changed anything. The organizations that use completion as their primary metric are measuring the activity of L&D, not the impact of it.
Completion rates answer one narrow question: did people start and finish the training? That is useful for compliance tracking. It tells you almost nothing about whether anyone learned anything, whether behavior changed, or whether the business is better off because the training happened.
Geert described where measurement is heading: “Completion is not the only metric that counts anymore. Data follows the learner around much more. It’s more easy to see how someone learned, their whole learning process, how they engage with certain trainings. You now even have AI coaches that can actually assess and feed through data, LRS (Learning Record Store) systems that can capture this data as well.”
He also flagged a consequence of this that L&D teams are still getting comfortable with: “As L&D, we’re also now becoming semi-BI experts, business intelligence. A lot of HR managers are now asking us for dashboards and reports that we have to deliver.”
That is a real shift in what the job requires. L&D teams are now expected to tell a data story, not just run training programs. Deloitte’s 2024 Global Human Capital Trends report found that only 19% of L&D leaders say they can effectively demonstrate the business impact of their learning programs, which means the gap between running good training and proving its value remains wide open for most teams.
Mark put it well: “We need to go deeper than just looking at completion rates in themselves. They have their place, but they’re not always going to be the place where we want to land. So we now need to think about: what else do we want to be able to return here? How do we prove the development of skills?”
The practical answer looks different for every organization, but some approaches hold up consistently. Skills assessments before and after a learning program give you a direct measure of capability change. Behavioral observation by managers, even informal, can confirm whether training translated into different habits on the job. Business metrics that the training was designed to affect, whether NPS, error rates, or time-to-competency for new hires, can be tracked against training activity to show correlation even when precise attribution is difficult.
Learning in the flow of work adds another layer. When learning is embedded into daily work rather than treated as a separate activity, engagement data becomes much more meaningful. Someone returning to a resource voluntarily, or pulling up a microlearning module at their workstation when a problem comes up, is telling you something important about whether the content is genuinely useful. That kind of signal does not show up in a completion report.
The organizations getting this right have stopped asking “how many people finished the training” and started asking “what did the training change.” That is a harder question. It is also the one that finally gives L&D a real seat at the table when business decisions are made.
How Easygenerator supports the shift from facilitator to enabler
Easygenerator is built around the idea that the people closest to the work are best placed to create training about it. Its author-first AI gives subject-matter experts the tools to turn their knowledge into didactically-sound e-learning without needing instructional design experience, while L&D teams retain governance and quality control over what gets published. For L&D professionals making the shift from content producer to learning consultant, Easygenerator provides the authoring infrastructure that makes this shift possible.
