The Blind Spot Holding L&D Back

Most L&D teams treat everyone like a learner.

That language may sound mission-aligned and friendly, but it clouds your strategy.

When you run L&D like a business, clarity matters. You need to know who you're serving, how they define value, and what outcomes they expect. The truth is that not everyone engaging with your work plays the same role.

L&D has two distinct audiences:

• The customer is the business. They fund the work, define success, and expect outcomes that move the company forward.

• The consumer is the employee. They engage with learning experiences and decide whether they'll apply what they've learned.

This is also why I choose to use "employee" instead of "learner." It's not semantics. It's a strategic choice to reinforce the distinction between who consumes the learning and who expects a return on the investment. That clarity drives better decisions.

Confusing the two audiences leads to misplaced priorities. Over-indexing on experience without clear business value? Budgets shrink. Focusing only on compliance and ignoring application? Engagement craters.

If you want to scale your impact, sequencing matters:

• Start with the business. Define what performance looks like. Understand the problem you're solving.

• Then, design with employees in mind. Make it easy, relevant, and actionable.

This isn't about picking one over the other. It's about earning the right to serve both by solving for the customer first.

That's the shift from building for "learners" in general to solving for customers and designing for consumers.

It changes everything: how you prioritize and measure success. Even how you say no.

The most effective L&D teams don't just ask, "What do employees want to learn?" They ask, "What is the business trying to achieve? And how can we enable that in a way employees will actually use?"

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