Insights
Technology is only half the answer. The other half is the manager sitting across from you.
Every time someone asks me how to roll out a training program inside a large organization, my first thought is the same. I know exactly where this is going. They are about to open the compliance system.
I have had this conversation more times than I can count. The compliance system was not built for development. It was built for compliance. The name is right there. But it is often the only place people know to go, so they go there. And then they wonder why nobody engages with the program they spent months building.
The friction is real. You sign in. You search by training item number, not by topic or keyword. An exact item number. There are no deep links. You cannot send someone a hyperlink that drops them directly into a course. The system was not designed to be discovered. It was designed to be assigned. And when something arrives from a compliance system, the first instinct every employee has is: this must be required. That instinct is almost impossible to overcome, no matter how good the content is.
In 2020, COVID shut down in-person training almost overnight. Suddenly a global workforce needed somewhere to go and we needed to move fast. I launched LinkedIn Learning globally that year, not because it was a long-term strategic initiative, but because we had an immediate problem and this was the answer. That project was the closest I had seen to what learning technology is actually supposed to feel like. Content people could find on their own. Paths that made sense. Something you could just send someone a link to.
Adoption was real. People used it. But what I kept watching was that sustaining it came back to the same thing it always comes back to. The people who engaged most were already showing up that way before the platform existed. They were reading, asking for stretch assignments, looking for ways to grow. LinkedIn Learning gave them a better tool. For everyone else, the platform alone did not change the behavior.
There is a phrase I have heard inside large organizations for years: you own your own development. It is true. And it is only half the story.
The manager does not own your development. But they do something equally important. They create the space that makes development possible. They notice what you are curious about and point you toward something. They find a course and say, I thought of you when I saw this. They ask what you want to get better at and then actually make room for it. That is not ownership. That is catalysis.
Without it, the best platform in the world sits underused. Not because people do not want to grow. Because growth requires a little bit of permission, a little bit of encouragement, and a manager who signals that it is worth the time.
The technology matters. You cannot build development culture inside a compliance container, and I spent years making that case. But getting the right platform is the floor, not the finish line. What sits above the floor is the manager who treats learning as something worth talking about in a regular conversation, not just logging in a performance review.
Most organizations are trying to solve a culture problem with a software purchase. The software helps. It is just not the thing.
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