Does L&D need to leave HR?

There is a familiar conversation doing the rounds.

L&D would have more impact if it left HR.

It is a tempting argument. Especially for learning teams who feel underused, misunderstood, underfunded or trapped inside a function with a reputation problem.

HR is often seen as reactive. Process-heavy. Compliance-led. Too close to policy, not close enough to performance. So it is easy to see why L&D might want to distance itself.

We are not HR.
We are learning.
We are capability.
We are performance.
We are strategic.

But here is the uncomfortable bit.

If your work is designed for employees, you are already part of the employee experience system. Whether you call that HR, people, talent, culture, learning or anything else, the work lives in the same ecosystem.

So the real question is not whether L&D should leave HR.

It is whether HR has been designed in a way that allows L&D to do meaningful work.

And too often, the answer is no.

The problem is not proximity. It is fragmentation

L&D does not need to divorce HR.

It needs to stop being trapped in a narrow version of it.

The issue is not that learning sits near policy, payroll, employee relations, reward, onboarding or internal comms. The issue is that those teams are often separated by artificial reporting lines, budget lines and responsibilities that make holistic employee experience harder than it needs to be.

Employees do not experience work in HR sub-functions.

They do not wake up thinking: “Today I am having a learning experience, then a payroll experience, then an internal comms experience, then a manager enablement experience.”

They just experience work.

And when that experience is fragmented, they feel it.

The onboarding webinar may be well designed, but the new starter still cannot find the right system.
The leadership programme may be polished, but managers are drowning in unclear processes.
The AI training may be engaging, but no one has explained why adoption matters in the flow of work.
The wellbeing campaign may be heartfelt, but workloads remain impossible.

That is not an L&D problem alone.

It is a system problem.

L&D has an inflated sense of impact. HR has an undervalued one

There is a little arrogance in the L&D argument. Not always. But enough to name it.

Many of us who have worked in learning have been guilty of it. We tell ourselves we are the impactful bit. The strategic bit. The human bit. The bit people actually value.

But ask an employee what matters more on a bad day: a beautifully designed e-learning module, or being paid correctly?

Ask someone in a difficult situation what they need first: a capability framework, or a process that protects them?

Learning matters. Deeply. But it does not sit above the fundamentals of employee experience. It sits on top of them.

If the basics are broken, learning cannot save the experience.

This is where the Maslow analogy is useful. People need the essentials before they can engage meaningfully with growth. Pay. Tools. Safety. Fairness. Clarity. Support. Trust.

Only then does development have somewhere to land.

So yes, L&D can be strategic. But not if it ignores the system around it.

And yes, HR has a reputation problem. But much of HR’s work is foundational to whether employees can function, feel safe and perform at all.

Less superiority. More integration.

The employee is the customer

Here is where the whole conversation needs reframing.

Employees are not just “people” in a vague, warm, well-intentioned sense.

They are customers of the organisation’s internal products, services, systems and experiences.

That does not make the relationship transactional. Quite the opposite. It makes the design responsibility clearer.

A customer-centric business would not design a product without understanding the customer journey. It would not assume one product works for every user. It would not ignore friction because the user is a “captive market”.

Yet this happens constantly in employee experience.

We design onboarding from what the business needs to tell people, not what new starters need to understand.
We design training from what leaders want people to know, not what employees need to do.
We design policies from risk, not reality.
We design comms from organisational urgency, not employee attention.

Then we wonder why engagement is low.

If employees are your most important customers, the employee experience needs the same design discipline as customer experience.

That means personas. Real ones. Not job titles pretending to be personas.

It means journey mapping. Not process mapping with nicer colours.

It means qualitative insight. Not assumptions from the centre.

It means designing for motivation, friction, behaviour and context.

This is where L&D can bring enormous value — not by leaving HR, but by helping HR become more human-centred, evidence-led and commercially useful.

Human-centred design cannot stop at the L&D boundary

One of the strongest arguments in the episode is that human-centred design becomes reductive if L&D only uses it to design L&D things.

If you interview employees about onboarding, their pain points will not politely stay inside the learning lane.

They may talk about unclear manager expectations.
Broken system access.
Confusing emails.
Too much information at the wrong time.
No one explaining how meetings work.
Not knowing who to ask.
Not understanding how to organise their calendar, inbox or priorities.

Some of those things may need learning support.

Some may need internal comms.
Some may need manager enablement.
Some may need process redesign.
Some may need a tiny operational change that costs nothing.

If L&D only has permission to turn insight into training, it will miss the point.

And if L&D leaves HR entirely, it may make that problem worse.

Because the insight employees give you is rarely about one function. It is about the whole working experience.

Human-centred design is most powerful when it moves across the system.

Not every problem needs training

This may be the most important sentence for L&D teams to sit with.

Not every employee experience problem needs training.

Sometimes the answer is a better message.
Sometimes it is a different sender.
Sometimes it is a manager prompt.
Sometimes it is a chatbot.
Sometimes it is a checklist.
Sometimes it is changing a default meeting setting.
Sometimes it is removing an unnecessary step.
Sometimes it is letting people find the answer in the flow of work.

If every problem becomes a learning intervention, L&D becomes a content factory.

And content factories are vulnerable.

Vulnerable to AI.
Vulnerable to budget cuts.
Vulnerable to irrelevance.
Vulnerable to the brutal question: what would actually happen if we stopped doing this?

That question should not terrify L&D. It should sharpen it.

Because the future of learning is not more content. It is better performance design.

Less “we need a module”.
More “what behaviour needs to change, and what is stopping it?”

Content creation is not the same as value creation

The episode takes aim at a familiar trap: the obsession with creating learning content because it is faster, cheaper or easier to produce.

AI-generated videos. Avatar-led explainers. Interactive PDFs turned into e-learning modules. Forty articles because someone decided forty was the number.

The question is not whether these things can be made.

Of course they can.

The question is whether they should exist.

Will people use them?
Will they trust them?
Will they change behaviour?
Will they make work easier?
Will they help someone perform better at the moment they need support?

Too often, L&D measures the production of the thing rather than the usefulness of the thing.

That is not impact. That is output.

A learning asset can be beautifully produced and still fail. It can win awards and still be hated by the people forced to use it.

That is the danger of designing without discovery.

The stakeholder likes it.
The industry praises it.
The learner resents it.

Only one of those people has to use it.

Internal comms should be L&D’s closest ally

One of the strongest practical reasons not to separate L&D from HR is internal comms.

Learning needs comms. Desperately.

Not as a last-minute promotional layer. Not as a “can you make this sound nice?” afterthought. But as a strategic design partner.

Because even the best learning experience fails if no one understands why it matters, where to find it, when to use it or how it connects to their reality.

And internal comms often has the same problem as L&D: it is brought in too late.

Both teams are frequently asked to rescue poor design with better messaging.

But if L&D, internal comms and employee experience worked together from the beginning, the work would be stronger.

The intervention would be clearer.
The message would be sharper.
The timing would be better.
The behaviour change would be more likely.

Maybe the better question is not whether L&D should leave HR.

Maybe it is whether learning, comms and employee experience should be designed as one connected system.

Measurement gets stronger when the system is joined up

L&D has talked about impact for years. But too often, it is trapped measuring what is easiest.

Completion rates. Attendance. Satisfaction. Quiz scores. Happy sheets.

Useful in small ways. Not enough.

Real impact lives closer to behaviour and business results. Did people do something differently? Did the experience improve? Did performance shift? Did managers change how they led? Did new starters become productive faster? Did customers feel the difference?

You can only answer those questions properly if L&D has access to wider employee and business data.

That means working across HR, not away from it.

A joined-up people function gives L&D more ways to understand impact. It connects learning to performance, engagement, retention, progression, productivity and customer outcomes.

But that also means sharing credit.

And perhaps that is part of the discomfort.

A silo lets you own your output.
A system asks you to share responsibility for outcomes.

That is harder.

It is also the work.

The AI question makes this more urgent

AI is forcing every function to confront its value.

L&D is not exempt.

If your role is mainly content creation, AI is coming for a significant part of it. If your team’s value is measured by how many assets it produces, that value will become easier to automate, compress or question.

The defensible future of L&D is not making more stuff.

It is understanding people, diagnosing performance problems, designing better systems of support, enabling behaviour change and proving impact.

That requires deeper connection to the business.

It requires closer partnership with HR, comms, operations, technology and leadership.

It requires L&D to stop defining itself by formats and start defining itself by the outcomes it helps create.

AI should not push L&D out of HR.

It should push L&D deeper into the work that matters.

The answer is an employee experience operating model

The useful future is not L&D versus HR.

It is an employee experience operating model where learning, comms, people operations, talent, culture and leadership enablement are designed around the employee journey.

That does not mean every team becomes one amorphous blob.

Specialisms still matter. Expertise still matters. Compliance still matters. Craft still matters.

But the work should be connected by shared insight, shared goals and shared accountability.

What if HR had real employee personas?
What if onboarding was designed as a full journey, not a first-day event?
What if L&D insight helped improve systems, not just courses?
What if internal comms shaped learning adoption from the start?
What if performance data, qualitative insight and employee feedback were used together?
What if the people function designed services the way great product teams design for customers?

That is not L&D leaving HR.