In 2019 I spoke with SparkNZ’s Learning Enablement team about one of the most innovative approaches I’d seen.[i] They literally embraced the ‘learning enabler’ identity and focussed on building a workforce who could learn continuously. Within a couple of years of that conversation new business leaders arrived and dismantled the team because their approach was unfamiliar and they couldn’t see its value. Their fate reveals one of our profession’s deepest challenges: how do we advocate for approaches that make us less visible but more impactful?
Last month, I wrote about how AI presents an opportunity for L&D to strategically reposition away from content creation and reshape our value proposition. However, we’re not spending nearly enough time exploring what this repositioning actually looks like – let alone advocating for it with key stakeholders.
Today, I want to tackle something that’s stopping us from making that shift.
We’ve been talking about becoming learning enablers for at least the past decade. We’ve discussed moving beyond the order-taker role, embedding learning in the workflow, and building learning culture. Yet too many L&D teams remain stuck in familiar patterns – responding to requests for training, measuring completions, and defending their value through visible courses and content.
The issue isn’t that we don’t know what needs to change. It’s that we’re facing an identity crisis that runs deeper than most of us can see or acknowledge.
The Concept That Never Caught On
Back in 2016, Josh Bersin and Dani Johnson introduced the concept of ‘Invisible L&D.’[ii] As Dani put it, invisible L&D teams were “trying to build L&D into the light sockets” – creating infrastructure where people find learning support exactly where and when it’s needed.
The light socket analogy is perfect. Light sockets are ubiquitous, delivering power exactly where and when it’s needed. They’re essential to how so many things function, even though nobody thinks about them.
Dani acknowledged the challenge: this approach was “unsettling for many L&D professionals,” even though those who did it successfully found they had “more influence and impact on the business as a whole.”
Over 20 years of research shows that high-performing L&D teams shift from being content producers to learning enablers.[iii]
So why didn’t this concept take off?
Invisible L&D had a fundamental marketing problem: who wants to be invisible? Being invisible felt like professional suicide.
Invisible L&D was good strategy but a massive challenge to L&D’s professional sense of identity.
What Are We Afraid Of?
How often do you find yourself defending your team’s relevance by pointing to your big course library or using completion data? When did you last feel anxious about whether leadership understands your value?
Somewhere along the way, we’ve created an equation in our minds: our visible activity equals our value. We’ve tied our professional worth to courses delivered, content created, and programs launched. The busier we look, the more valuable we feel.
This creates a fundamental fear: if we’re invisible, how do we prove our value? How do we justify our existence? How do we advance our careers? The concern is understandable; in many organisations invisible work is undervalued work.
Our need to be seen prevents us from being most effective.
The Real Strategic Imperative: Learning Agility
In The L&D Leader (releasing October 3, 2025), my co-author Laura Overton and I argue that the horizon is accelerating toward us.[iv] What we mean is that the time between disruption and the need to act is shrinking rapidly. The skills people need today will be different tomorrow, and, in an increasing number of cases, dramatically different next year.
In today’s context of continuous changing, learning agility is the most critical capability we can develop in our organisations. Learning agility is the capability that enables individuals, teams and organisations to continuously sense change, respond, and adapt. It’s what separates those that thrive amid uncertainty from those that struggle to keep up.
But here’s the catch: building learning agility requires us to step back from being the visible ‘Training Department’ and become the builders and maintainers of invisible infrastructure that enables continuous learning throughout the organisation.
This is exactly what SparkNZ demonstrated. As Kerry Peguero from their team explained when discussing the ‘orienteering approach’ in their onboarding program, “Rather than learning a piece of content, we actually needed [new starters] to adopt a behaviour and a way of working and a mindset that was going to set them up for success.” They were building the capability for people to learn continuously.
The SparkNZ team understood something profound: “Traditional L&D is sometimes a bit of roadblock. We need to get out of the way and let people do what people do.”
Ironically, this approach was eventually dismantled when leadership changed and the new CEO didn’t see the value of the team’s approach. This illustrates one of the key reasons why enabling learning struggles to be widely adopted — it requires ongoing advocacy to leaders who may not immediately see the strategic value of an ‘invisible’ L&D function.
Making the Mindset Shift
The shift begins with reframing the fundamental question. Instead of asking ‘How do I make L&D visible?’ try asking ‘How do I make learning visible everywhere?’
When I work with teams on building continuous learning, I don’t ask people ‘How do you learn?’ because they immediately think about courses. Instead, I ask ‘How do you get better at doing your job?’ I anchor this by asking them to identify one thing they are better at today than they were 12 months ago, and to tell me how they improved. This simple reframe helps people recognise that they’ve already been learning without courses – through experience, through people, through investigation and experimentation.
Changing our mindset is a critical first step, followed by building new L&D capabilities. The recently launched AITD Capability Framework acknowledges that building learning agility requires systemic approaches beyond courses and content, whilst emphasising that L&D professionals need advocacy skills to articulate the value of less visible approaches.[v]
We need to resolve the paradox: we must get better at advocating for approaches that make L&D less visible.
Getting Started
Examine your visibility ratio. Look back over your work in the past six months and identify the balance of effort you’ve put into visible learning solutions – where L&D has created content or facilitated courses and sessions – versus invisible approaches where you’ve enabled learning by building the autonomy and motivation of individuals and teams to learn, or by enhancing activities where learning already happens naturally. What does this ratio tell you about where you’re focusing your energy?
Then plan to shift the balance over the coming six months. Consider how you might move toward enabling learning by: supporting performance through job aids or nudges at the point of need rather than content-heavy programmes; connecting people who have relevant expertise with those who need it; or noticing where learning is happening organically in your organisation and amplifying it. Choose one approach that feels most relevant to your context and experiment with it.
The Choice Ahead
We have a choice to make. We can continue fighting for visibility through traditional approaches where we are more visible, gradually becoming less relevant as AI handles more content creation. Or we can become the providers of the invisible infrastructure that powers organisational learning agility — the light sockets that deliver power exactly where and when it’s needed.
The future belongs to organisations that can learn faster than change happens. Learning agility is how we get there. Building it requires us to let go of our need to be the visible training department and embrace becoming learning enablers.
What assumptions about your professional value are you ready to challenge?
[i] Learning Uncut episode 30: Sparking Learning Enablement Pt 1 – Liv Wilson and Kerry Peguero, published 8 July 2019
[ii] Bersin, J., The Learning Function Has Become Invisible, Chief Learning Officer, 3 November 2016; and Johnson, D., Invisible L&D, Learning In The Cloud, 30 August 2016
[iii] The Learning Performance Benchmark (previously known as the Towards Maturity Health Check) was founded by my co-author Laura Overton in 2003. This study found that one of the key shifts made by high-performing learning teams (the 10% whose work makes the most difference to business goals) is from being content producers to learning enablers.
[iv] Overton, L & Ockers, M. (2025), The L&D Leader. Principles and practice for delivering business value, Kogan Page
[v] Michelle Ockers led the development of the Australian Institute of Training and Development (AITD) Capability Framework. The framework includes a Learning Culture capability category with 4 distinct, complementary capabilities. It also includes a Promotion and Advocacy capability in the Strategy and Partnering category. Explore the framework at https://www.aitd.com.au/aitd-capability-framework
