Essential Questions to Ask Before Setting Up a Learning & Development Function

Find out which learning activities to get underway first

Wendy Scott
5 min readJun 17, 2024
Created by the author on Canva

Without a dedicated Learning & Development team, employee training is left to managers, the HR team, and anyone else who has the time to do it. In many cases, this means training is neglected, unrecorded, and sporadic.

If you work for a big organization, it will have a Learning and Development team, but many smaller or medium-sized companies won’t.

Once an organization sees the lack of an L&D function as an issue, someone will be allocated to set one up. If that person is you and you don’t have much L&D experience, this could be a challenge.

I’ve set up several Training Departments from scratch over my years as an L&D specialist and manager, and I’ve learned that if you want to enhance L&D within your organization, you have to start by asking questions.

But first of all, what does L&D even do? Aren’t they the same as HR?

That is not precisely the case, though there is much overlap between L&D and HR.

A Learning & Development function (aka The Training Team) will typically be responsible for the following:

  • Employee onboarding

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Wendy Scott
Wendy Scott

Written by Wendy Scott

L&D professional writing practical, step-by-step leadership and training & development articles to help leaders, managers & trainers grow their careers.

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