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. The new software rollout that nobody really got trained on. The sales conversation that changed last quarter. The compliance update that arrived in January and got explained differently by six different managers.
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.
