As L&D professionals, we pride ourselves on helping employees learn and grow. We design onboarding journeys that turn new hires into confident contributors. We build skill pathways for managers, craft leadership programmes for future executives, and deliver transformation initiatives that keep organisations competitive.

But here’s the paradox: while we’re charting growth paths for everyone else, many of us don’t have one for ourselves.

While there are valuable programmes and accreditations in our field, there’s still no single, structured route into L&D leadership. And because business expectations, digital tools, and workforce needs have all shifted so dramatically in recent years, the path forward for today’s leaders looks very different from what it once was. Without adapting to this new reality, the function risks falling behind.

In this article, we’ll explore how L&D leadership has changed, the skills now essential for success, the consequences of sticking to outdated models, and how we can build the kind of development journey our profession has long deserved.

 

From chance to choice: the making of an L&D leader

Ask ten L&D leaders how they got here, and you’ll hear ten different stories. Some started in HR, others in operations, education, or even sales. Rarely does anyone say, “I studied to be an L&D leader.”

Most of us arrived by chance – driven by a passion for learning and for helping people grow. We built expertise on the job: picking up frameworks as we went, learning from the occasional mentor, and adapting to new challenges in real time.

This path has produced passionate, committed professionals. But it has also left many without the toolkit to lead strategically. We may know how to run great learning programmes, but not always how to connect them directly to business priorities, secure executive sponsorship, or structure a scalable learning ecosystem.

And as the pace of change accelerates, those gaps are becoming harder to ignore.

 

The stakes for L&D have never been higher

Without an up-to-date and relevant development path of our own, L&D leaders risk getting stuck in a reactive cycle – delivering courses on request, tracking completion rates, and justifying value after the fact. That’s not enough in today’s climate.

AI is raising the stakes even further. Automation is already handling operational tasks like course creation, catalog curation, and skills tagging. If we stay focused only on delivery, we risk being replaced by the very tools we should be harnessing. The real opportunity – and the safeguard against obsolescence – is in becoming more strategic: shaping workforce capability, influencing business priorities, and proving impact in ways that only people can.

When L&D can’t operate strategically, it’s seen as a service provider rather than a driver of business performance. That perception makes it harder to secure budgets, influence priorities, and lead transformation.

The risk isn’t just reputational – it’s operational. Teams that stick with outdated models or outdated skill sets often plateau in maturity. They may excel at delivering training but fail to anticipate future capability needs, align learning with evolving business priorities, or adapt to disruptive forces like AI and automation. And when the function stalls, so does the organisation’s ability to compete.

The demands on L&D leaders are greater, the complexity is deeper, and the margin for error is smaller than at any time in recent memory. Which means we can’t afford to leave leadership capability – or team maturity – to chance any longer.

 

Closing the gap starts with us

Here’s the truth: no one else is going to fix this for us. What’s missing isn’t effort or intent – it’s a development path that reflects today’s realities. We need guidance designed for this era: performance-focused, digitally fluent, data-literate, and ready to harness AI. Without it, we risk leaving our function underpowered at precisely the moment it’s most needed. Without it, we risk leaving our function underpowered at precisely the moment it’s most needed.

If we want L&D to be recognized as a strategic driver, the work begins with investing in ourselves – and in the long-term maturity of our teams. That means building the skills to operate at a strategic level, sustaining that capability over time, and continuously evolving with the business.

And there are signs of progress. Across the industry, we’re seeing professionals step forward, build networks, share what works, and seek out frameworks that raise the bar. They aren’t just reacting to change, they’re shaping it.

Every conversation, certification, and collaborative project strengthens our collective position – and the credibility of L&D as a true partner in business performance.

 

What a modern learning programme for L&D could look like

So what would it look like if we actually built out such a resource?

It would be rooted in the real challenges we face every day – built by L&D, for L&D – and designed as a practical, collaborative journey rather than a theory-heavy curriculum. It would help leaders with key themes like:

Business strategy and alignment

• Identifying and prioritizing the business goals that matter most.
• Using learning use cases to structure powerful conversations with stakeholders.
• Building a strategy and roadmap with templates you can put to work immediately.

Advanced skills-based learning

• Mapping your organisation’s current skills and spotting the ones that matter most.
• Pinpointing the highest-impact gaps and deciding how to close them.
• Shaping a content strategy that aligns directly to business priorities.

Strategic applications for AI

• Pinning down where AI delivers real performance gains in the L&D workflow.
• Speeding up authoring and skills mapping with AI-powered tools.
• Automating repetitive work so you can focus on strategic design.

Measuring what really matters

• Stopping chasing surface-level stats and tracking outcomes that prove value.
• Telling compelling stories with data that resonates with CEOs, VPs, and business partners.
• Using insights to protect your role, secure investment, and elevate your influence.
   

L&D organisation and tech to scale and lead

• Exploring the most common team structures and how they work in practice.
• Building out a tech stack that matures alongside your L&D strategy
• Designing and rolling out governance models for your organisation's unique structure.

But the real difference would be in how this learning is experienced. The most effective version wouldn’t be just a course – it would be a space to experiment, gain feedback, and grow alongside peers who understand the challenges firsthand. It would give L&D leaders not just knowledge, but the credibility, confidence, and influence to lead transformation.

 

Walking the talk

The good news is, this isn’t just hypothetical.

Across the industry, a growing number of initiatives are emerging that put these principles into practice. One such example is the L&D Performance Academy – a peer-driven, performance-focused journey designed to help leaders build exactly these capabilities.

It tackles the issues that define modern L&D – AI, performance-focus, digital learning, and impact measurement – while offering a collaborative space to work through real-world challenges with peers. In other words, it gives L&D leaders the tools, confidence, and community to grow in the ways today’s environment demands. 

Because the future of learning in our organisations depends on the people who lead it.

 

Article provided by the team at 360Learning.